By Humberto Maturana Romesin and Gerda Verden-Zoller, Opp, G.: Peterander, F. (Hrsg.): Focus Heilpadagogik, Ernst Reinhardt, Munchen\/Basel 1996.<\/p>\n
This is apparent in that we become ill when we are deprived of love at whatever age. No doubt we live a culture in which we are frequently in war and kill each other on different rational grounds that justify our mutual total denial as human beings. But doing that does not bring to us happiness, or spiritual comfort and harmony. Love and aggression – are they polar features of our biology or, of our cultural human existence? Are we genetically aggressive animals that love occassionally, or are we loving animals that cultivate aggression culturally? Our purpose in this article is to maintain that we are loving animals that cultivate aggression in a cultural alienation that may eventually change our biology. To this end we shall speak about the following themes in short but basic statements:
\nA) the systemic constitution and conservation of human identity;
\nB) the origin and development of the self in the mother\/child relations;
\nC) the evolutionary origin of humanness in the conservation of neoteny and the expansion of the female sexuality;
\nD) the biology of love.
\nA) That we are living systems means that we are structure determined systems, that we operate at every moment according to our structure at that moment, and that nothing external to us can specify what happens in us as a result of our interactions in a medium. External agents can only trigger in us structural changes determined in us. Moreover, the structure of a living system is not fixed, it changes according to its own internal dynamics and following the course of the structural changes triggered in it by its recurrent
\ninteractions in the medium. In fact, all that happens in us, in our individual life histories, and all that has happened in the history that gave origin to us, necessarily has taken place and must have taken place through our operation as structure determined systems.<\/p>\n