Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews
Print ISSN: 0010-7549
Published by: American Psychological Association
Publisher Location: US

DOI: 10.1037/006196
Copyright year: 1960
Copyright holder: American Psychological Association
Volume: 5, Issue: 11, Nov 1960, pages 353-355
Print pub-date: November 1960
Holistic personality
ARTHUR R. JENSEN
The reviewer identifies the authors in his review. Dr. Jensen himself is Research Associate in the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research at the University of California in Berkeley and also Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology. It was Percival Symonds at Teachers College, Columbia, whose assistant Jensen was for three years, who interested him in the subject of personality. Symonds and Jensen have written a book together on the development of personality, a volume that the Columbia University Press should publish shortly. Between his PhD and his going to Berkeley, Jensen had two years with Eysenck in the Maudsley Laboratory in London. While there he wrote the 1958 chapter on Personality in the Annual Review of Psychology.
Product: 1962-01013-000. Toward Understanding Human Personalities Robert Ward Leeper and Peter Madison New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959. Pp. xvi + 439. $5.50.
History: PsycINFO ReleaseDate: 23-10-2006; PsycCRITIQUES ReleaseDate: 23-10-2006; PsycINFO CorrectionDate: 21-08-2017; PsycCRITIQUES CorrectionDate: 21-08-2017

Abstract
Reviews the book, _Toward Understanding Human Personalities_ by Robert Ward Leeper and Peter Madison (see record 1962-01013-000). This book does not present a new theory of personality nor is it theoretical in any systematic sense. What the authors have attempted and have done admirably well, is to spread before the reader a vast array of real-life phenomena that are the raw materials of personality research. In their effort to present a panoramic view of the domain of personality, the authors have drawn upon innumerable, personal anecdotes, case histories, records of psychotherapy, student autobiographies, descriptive anthropology, and works of fiction. This book does not suggest that personality can be treated as a natural science amenable to rigorous research. It contains however hardly any mention of biological and hereditary aspects of personality, or of the great amount of work that has already been done in the measurement and assessment of personality, or of the statistical and experimental methods that might advance our knowledge of personality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)

Keywords: personalities; research; case histories; psychotherapy; student autobiographies; anthropology

This book is the fruit of almost a lifetime of thinking about personality. Though Robert Leeper, Chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon, is best known for his work in the fields of learning and cognition and for his critiques of Clark Hull and Kurt Lewin, he tells us in the Preface that his major interest has always been in personality. He began thinking about this book as an undergraduate in the 1920s and began writing it in 1937. He has worked on it steadily for twenty-two years. In the last five years he had as collaborator one of his former students, Peter Madison, a Harvard PhD in clinical psychology, now at Swarthmore College. The book is a complete amalgam of their joint efforts.

The field of personality today is hardly a science in the sense of being in possession of a body of verified laws and theories. It can be called a scientific field only inasmuch as we may regard its subject matter as a realm of natural phenomena which may be subjected to the usual methods of science, that is to say, to systematic description, classification, measurement, analysis, the discovery of functional relationships, and the eventual comprehension of these relationships or laws under a general model or theory.

Headway is made in this endeavor by scrupulous attention to parsimony and precision in the use of language, to operational definition and, in the early stages at least, to simplification and abstraction. All this must proceed in close proximity to empirical realities, to controlled observation and experimentation. The signs of progress in our understanding of personality are becoming apparent, not so much as yet in the form of substantive knowledge about personality as in the development of methods for studying personality scientifically. Progress is being made, though we are still just at the beginning of a science of personality and still have far to go even in the development of our tools of investigation. But this is the direction we must follow if we are to understand personality in the sense referred to as Wissenschaft, that is, in the objective, analytical, nomothetic sense.

In contrast to Wissenschaft is another kind of understanding called Verstehen, an intuitive, holistic, empathic, appreciative way of viewing and interpreting phenomena in terms of one's own feeling states. It is more in this tradition of Verstehen rather than Wissenschaft that Leeper and Madison speak of "understanding human personalities." Both the strengths and weaknesses of their work are largely a result of this holistic, idiographic, Verstehen-type approach.

In dedicating the book to Kohler and Tolman, the authors acknowledge their indebtedness to the gestalt-field theory. They have written the first introductory textbook in the personality field having a field-theoretical orientation. (Gardner Murphy's Personality may come to mind, but it is far more eclectic.) The authors have been influenced also by psychologists such as Adler, Rank, Horney, Sullivan, Carl Rogers, and George Kelly. They also owe much to Freud, but they disapprove of the `narrowness' of orthodox psychoanalytic theory, with its emphasis on biological drives and the `negative' aspects of personality.

THE book does not present a new theory of personality nor is it theoretical in any systematic sense. What the authors have attempted and have done admirably well - some might say they have done it too well - is to spread before the reader a vast array of real-life phenomena that are the raw materials of personality research. Much of the book, perhaps half of it, is taken up with colorful, rich, realistically detailed descriptions of various human experiences. In their effort to present a panoramic view of the domain of personality, the authors have drawn upon innumerable, personal anecdotes, case histories, records of psychotherapy, student autobiographies, descriptive anthropology, and works of fiction, in one instance quoting a passage of 10,000 words from a novel by Lillian Smith. On the other hand, we hear nothing at all about such `colorless' things as measurements, questionnaires, inventories, test scores, correlations, types, traits, factors, or dimensions.

Rather than working toward a science of personality, the authors have merely developed a manner of speaking about personality. It is a manner that will be easy for the layman to grasp in this day when Freud and the unconscious are household terms. The book translates into the language of `dynamic' and gestalt psychology what are still essentially the layman's ways of thinking about human behavior.

The idea most insistently and pervasively expressed throughout the book is that personality is like an iceberg, with most of its mass submerged from view. The most important part of personality is what lies below the surface. Behavior itself is interesting only in that it provides clues as to what is going on underneath the behavior, or behind it, or inside the person somewhere. This underlying something, whatever it may be, is not conceived of in physiological terms nor is it linked in any clear or operational way to observable behavior or to events in the environment. The underlying "mechanisms," "processes," "dynamic organizations," and the like are simply a redundant manner of speaking about behavior. For example, the authors explain that a person tires of a particular activity because of "satiation effects," and "satiation effects" are in evidence when a person tires of a particular activity. Obviously nothing of an explanatory nature is achieved by the use of the term satiation effects.

"Perceptual processes" carry the greatest burden of explanation. The dogs in the Solomon and Wynne experiment are said to go on avoiding the electric-shock box even when there is no longer any shock because there is no change in their perception of the situation. When the dogs cease jumping, it is because of a change in their perception. The behavioristic, anxiety-reduction interpretations of Solomon and Wynne, Dollard and Miller, and Mowrer are not hinted at. Yet the question is not even raised concerning how the perceptual change comes about.

The authors do not regard all individual differences in human behavior as personality. Personality refers only to "emotionally significant processes." It is how the person perceives and deals with things of emotional significance to him. Personality is largely learned (learning consists of a change in perception); it is also a resultant of the reintegration of past experiences brought about by the forces of the immediate psychological field.

THE critical reader is apt to become confused by the lack of definitional clarity in the authors' manner of speaking about personality. Often the key words outnumber the actual concepts to which they refer - for example, processes and mechanisms, conflict and disunity. We read that "personality processes are perceptual processes." Also "perceptual processes may be motivational processes." "Emotions are motives" and "emotional processes are perceptual processes." These "processes" are never anchored in any way to observables. The closest the authors ever come to doing so is to state that "the development of emotional motives ... results from the formation and growth of neural systems that the individual originally did not possess" (p. 217). Many of the explanations by analogy are more puzzling than clarifying. ("Perceptual processes can be motivational processes at the same time they are perceptual processes, just as it is true that a person is living in Pennsylvania at the same time he is living in Philadelphia;" "The world topples into war because it resembles a pyramid standing on its point instead of on its base.")

Another manner of thinking about behavior that the book inculcates, perhaps inadvertently through the loose use of language, is the notion that we "use" habits, we "use" motives, emotions, "reintegrative mechanisms," and so on, as if we possessed a store of mechanisms or processes within us that we could call upon in various circumstances.

For what audience is the book intended? This question arouses my most serious concern. The authors have expressly addressed themselves primarily to the psychology undergraduate taking his first course in personality. Certainly the book will be easy and interesting for this audience. The style is smooth and very readable. The approach is appropriately didactic for the undergraduate; in every chapter the authors adhere to the rule of first telling the reader what they are going to say, then saying it, and then telling the reader what they have said. Consequently, more advanced students may feel that the book is longer than necessary for its essential contents.

My concern is that I greatly doubt that this book will attract into psychology or into the area of personality those students who have a scientific bent. Yet it is they who are the future hope of psychology. This book does not suggest that personality can be treated as a natural science amenable to rigorous research. Actually, for an introductory text in a field at this stage in its development, the text is probably not sufficiently eclectic. It contains hardly any mention of biological and hereditary aspects of personality, or of the great amount of work that has already been done in the measurement and assessment of personality, or of the statistical and experimental methods that might advance our knowledge of personality. In this respect the exposition stands in marked contrast to the texts of, say, Cattell and Guilford. The names of such outstanding researchers in personality as Cattell and Eysenck are not even mentioned, and Guilford's name appears only in the bibliography. Indeed, the authors eschew any mention of factor-analytic or behavioristic research in personality. Occasionally they even make slighting remarks about experimentation and laboratory investigation as being "colorless and neutral."

On the other hand, this is a book that the researcher in personality may well afford to read, if only to be reminded of the richness and complexity of his domain. Still we know that if we are to make any real progress in a science of personality, we must be content with a degree of simplicity that permits functional analysis, even though we must seek it in the laboratory. However one may disapprove the authors' depreciation of this point of view, they must nevertheless be commended for achieving their unique purpose of presenting personality in a richly human perspective.