Chapter 12 Allport: Psychology of the Individual 355I
n the fall of 1920, a 22-year-old American philosophy and economics student was
visiting with an older brother in Vienna. During his visit, the young man penned
a note to Sigmund Freud requesting an appointment. Freud, then the world’s most
famous psychiatrist, agreed to see the young man and suggested a specific time for
a meeting.
The young American arrived at No. 19 Berggasse in plenty of time for his
appointment with Dr. Freud. At the designated time, Freud opened the door to his
consulting room and quietly ushered the young man inside. The American visitor
suddenly realized that he had nothing to say. Searching his mind for some incident
that might interest Freud, he remembered seeing a small boy on the tram car that
day while traveling to Freud’s home. The little boy, about 4 years old, displayed
an obvious dirt phobia, constantly complaining to his well-starched mother about
the filthy conditions on the car. Freud listened silently to the story and then—with
a typical Freudian technique—asked his young visitor if he was in reality talking
about himself. Feeling guilty, the young man managed to change the subject and
to escape without too much further embarrassment.
The American visitor to Freud’s consulting room was Gordon Allport, and this
encounter was the spark that ignited his interest in personality theory. Back in the
United States, Allport began to wonder if there might be room for a third approach
to personality, one that borrowed from traditional psychoanalysis and animal-driven
learning theories, but also one that adopted a more humanistic stance. Allport quickly
completed work for a PhD in psychology and embarked on a long and distinguished
career as a staunch advocate for the study of the individual.Overview of Allport’s Psychology
of the Individual
More than any other personality theorist, Gordon Allport emphasized the unique-
ness of the individual. He believed that attempts to describe people in terms of
general traits rob them of their unique individuality. For this reason, Allport
objected to trait and factor theories that tend to reduce individual behaviors to
common traits. He insisted, for example, that one person’s stubbornness is differ-
ent from any other person’s stubbornness and the manner in which one person’s
stubbornness interacts with his or her extraversion and creativity is duplicated by
no other individual.
Consistent with Allport’s emphasis on each person’s uniqueness was his
willingness to study in depth a single individual. He called the study of the indi-
vidual morphogenic science and contrasted it with the nomothetic methods used
by most other psychologists. Morphogenic methods are those that gather data on
a single individual, whereas nomothetic methods gather data on groups of people.
Allport also advocated an eclectic approach to theory building. He accepted some
of the contributions of Freud, Maslow, Rogers, Eysenck, Skinner, and others; but
he believed that no one of these theorists is able to adequately explain the total
growing and unique personality. To Allport, a broad, comprehensive theory is
preferable to a narrow, specific theory even if it does not generate as many testable
hypotheses.