 The Structure of Behavior first critiques traditional reflex accounts of the relation between stimulus and reaction in light of the findings of Kurt Goldstein and other contemporary physiologists, arguing that the organism is not passive but imposes its own conditions between the given stimulus and the expected response, so that behavior remains inexplicable in purely anatomical or atomistic terms. Merleau-Ponty instead describes the nervous system as a “field of forces” apportioned according to “modes of preferred distribution”, a model inspired by Wolfgang Köhler’s Gestalt physics (SC: 48/46). Both physiology and behavior are “forms”, that is, 