The question and meaning of technology for human beings has received diverse attention from many perspectives, both philosophical and practical. The two dominant perspectives on technological thinking are determinism and constructivism. When viewed deterministically, technology exhibits an internal force and logic of its own. A deterministic approach to thinking about technology considers the influences, both positive and negative, that technology exerts on society. Contrastingly, technology is also viewed as socially constructed and contingent upon human agency and socio-cultural factors. This approach reacts to and rejects technological determinism.

Importantly, the main approaches to technology also assume that it is either value free and neutral, or humanly controlled. The value-free and neutral approach, with extrinsic moral or ethical dimensions, separates means and ends. Alternatively, the humanly controlled approach, with intrinsic moral and ethical dimensions, correlates means and ends.

By way of definitnion, technology can be understood in a fourfold manner as object, knowledge, activity and volition. This enables us to encompass otherwise competing approaches, as well as position the various forms of technology, within the context of a technological system. Additionally, because neither technology nor the agent of technology (the individual) exist in isolation, they constitute technological systems which, can be also understood in a fourfold hierarchical manner as comprising, individuals, organisations, sectors and nations.

Importantly, my approach to technological systems posits that individuals deploy technology as knowledge (maxims, rules, theories), purposefully as volition (active and receptive) to the tasks of technology as activity (invention, innovation and adoption), to create technology as objects (utilities, tools, machines).

At the intersection of the competing approaches to technology, the primary agents of technology, and basic units of analysis within technological systems, are individual human beings. Historically both positivists and constructivists have long resisted “lifting the lid” of the psychological or so-called cognitive “black box” of the individual. The continual tension between these two approaches, and the incomplete picture afforded by such analysis, strongly suggests that an additional line of enquiry is required to add to our understanding of the phenomenon of technology and its relationship to human beings. Similarly, the determining roles of individual human beings in activities of invention, innovation and technological diffusion, would also suggest the need for an additional approach.

Along the intellectual lines proffered by Jung, and in an attempt to redress the splitting tendency of modernism, I assert that the play of opposites associated with technology ‘culminates in a release, out of which comes the “third”. In the third, the tension is resolved and the lost unity is restored‘. Consequently, the psychological approach to the relationship between human beings and technological systems developed as an outcome to my PhD research, contributes to such a synthesis. As Jung says, ‘we are not liberated by leaving something behind but only by fulfilling our task as mixta composita {mixed entities}, i.e., human beings between the opposites‘.

A psycho-constructivist understanding of technology can assist our understanding of the relationship between human beings and technology, as a way of being in the world. Practically, a psycho- constructivist understanding of technology, as a way of doing in the world, can enhance the daily engagement with technology as well as the process of innovation. Therefore, it can also contribute toward a transpersonal understanding of the life-world that unites the natural and the artefactual and helps us find our place as human beings in the world, and especially within technological systems.