Chapter 12 Allport: Psychology of the Individual 357the introduction to this chapter. This meeting with Freud greatly influenced
Allport’s later ideas on personality. With a certain audacity, the 22-year-old Allport
wrote to Freud announcing that he was in Vienna and offered the father of psycho-
analysis an opportunity to meet with him. The encounter proved to be a fortuitous
life-altering event for Allport. Not knowing what to talk about, the young visitor
told Freud about seeing a small boy on the tram car earlier that day. The young
child complained to his mother about the filthy conditions of the car and announced
that he did not want to sit near passengers whom he deemed to be dirty. Allport
claimed that he chose this particular incident to get Freud’s reaction to a dirt pho-
bia in a child so young, but he was quite flabbergasted when Freud “fixed his
kindly therapeutic eyes upon me and said, ‘And was that little boy you?’ ” (Allport,
1967, p. 8). Allport said he felt guilty and quickly changed the topic.
Allport told this story many times, seldom changing any words, and never
revealing the rest of his lone encounter with Freud. However, Alan Elms has
uncovered Allport’s written description of what happened next. After realizing that
Freud was expecting a professional consultation, Allport then talked about his dis-
like of cooked raisins:
I told him I thought it due to the fact that at the age of three, a nurse had told
me they were “bugs.” Freud asked, “When you recalled this episode, did your
dislike vanish?” I said, “No.” He replied, “Then you are not at the bottom of
it.” (Elms, 1994, p. 77)When Allport returned to the United States, he immediately enrolled in the
PhD program at Harvard. After finishing his degree, he spent the following 2 years
in Europe studying under the great German psychologists Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang
Kohler, William Stern, Heinz Werner, and others in Berlin and Hamburg.
In 1924, he returned again to Harvard to teach, among other classes, a new
course in the psychology of personality. In his autobiography, Allport (1967) sug-
gested that this course was the first personality course offered in an American
college. The course combined social ethics and the pursuit of goodness and moral-
ity with the scientific discipline of psychology. It also reflected Allport’s strong
personal dispositions of cleanliness and morality.
Two years after beginning his teaching career at Harvard, Allport took a
position at Dartmouth College. Four years later, he returned to Harvard and
remained there for the rest of his professional career.
In 1925, Allport married Ada Lufkin Gould, whom he had met when both
were graduate students. Ada Allport, who received a master’s degree in clinical
psychology from Harvard, had the clinical training that her husband lacked. She
was a valuable contributor to some of Gordon’s work, especially his two exten-
sive case studies—the case of Jenny Gove Masterson (discussed in the section
titled The Study of the Individual) and the case of Marion Taylor, which was
never published (Barenbaum, 1997).
The Allports had one child, Robert, who became a pediatrician and thus sand-
wiched Allport between two generations of physicians, a fact that seemed to have
pleased him in no small measure (Allport, 1967). Allport’s awards and honors were
many. In 1939, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association
(APA). In 1963, he received the Gold Medal Award of the APA; in 1964, he was