The following is an extremely concise summary of Paul's ideas (the kind you write on the back of your hand before you enter the examination room). Since I prepared it after he died, he never got to correct any mistakes I may have made. Still, it may be useful to some people.
Life begins when inanimate matter develops a capacity to interact with its environment in order to survive. and organs provide and functions which allow the individual to and its world.
To permit the communication of genetic material on which evolution is based, organisms specialize into and individuals. Various mechanisms bring otherwise competing individuals together, beginning with the externally fertilized egg still used by fish. As life becomes air-breathing, amphibians still lay eggs in water. When life moves inland reptiles need hard shells, necessitating fertilizing the egg before it is laid and requiring even closer contact. and evolve to override competition between female and male long enough for copulation to take place.
To give each individual more time to adapt to its specific environment and increase the range of environments a species can tolerate, a longer childhood is now required. Mammals evolve the capacities to divide the and of their offspring during this new growth phase between the parents. This specialization overflows into all areas of the personality. In most mammals it is the female which specializes in and the male in .
Man is the only mammal that allows the individual to make personal contributions to the welfare of the social group via the roles of the or and the or . Contributions to the species as a whole arise in the historical era in the form of that storehouse of and called civilization. A lifelong devotion to the search for that can replace or the reaching for that can supplant is the mark of the creative individual.
During the rise of civilization, gender polarity between the female and the male becomes overshadowed by the psychological polarity between first and , and then and . Psychological polarity is expressed in family life between the father and son and mother and daughter. Social roles are still influenced by gender polarity, but are scorned by creative individuals as being irrelevant to the larger purposes of civilization.
At this level of evolution it becomes useful to redefine the terms and to refer to those who bring into the world and those who develop .
A secondary polarity appears to have evolved between subjective and objective types. Subjectivity in a masculine helps to balance his personality, as does objectivity in a feminine. Objective masculines and subjective feminines referred to as unbalanced.
There may be a tertiary polarity between hedonists and stoics. Hedonists are more developed in the two-dimensional (fun and pleasure) component of their personalities, stoics in the three-dimensional (creative) component.
There are four components of man's psychological life:
A fulfilled life requires balancing and expressing the needs and purposes of each component. If you try too hard to be creative, you suffer exhaustion or "creativity poisoning". If life is all fun, you loose your sense of self. If all work, you'll never know what it's all been for. If all romance and adventure, the ability to contribute to the building of a better world evaporates.
The goal of living for the creative individual is his own personal growth, the reward for which is experienced as or . The goal of society as a whole is social progress. There are no apparent limits to the personal growth and social progress our species is capable of.