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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Historical and Contemporary Background

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The second chapter provides a brief historical background of fundamental motivation by focussing on two main themes given in chronological order. The first adopts a historical approach, identifying several theoretical traditions and influential theorists who have worked on the idea of fundamental motivation. This brief overview includes ideas preceding the rise of evolutionary theory and the subsequent emergence of such contemporary theoretical traditions as psychoanalysis, behaviourism and humanistic psychology. The second theme centres on the identification of the most recent contemporary contributions that are quite similar to the main ideas of this book. The concluding section comments on the relation between the postulations in the book and contemporary literature, emphasising the importance of initial assumptions in theory construction.