Chapter 12 Allport: Psychology of the Individual 371Her letters were filled again with animosity for Ross, a suspicious and cynical
attitude toward others, and a morbid yet dramatic approach to life.
Three years into the correspondence, Ross suddenly died. After his death,
Jenny’s letters expressed a somewhat more favorable attitude toward her son. Now
she did not have to share him with anyone. Now he was safe—no more prostitutes.
For the next 8 years, Jenny continued writing to Glenn and Isabel, and they
usually answered her. However, they served mostly as neutral listeners and not as
advisors or confidantes. Jenny continued to be overly concerned with death and
money. She increasingly blamed others for her misery and intensified her suspicions
and hostility toward her caregivers. After Jenny died, Isabel (Ada) commented that,
in the end, Jenny was “the same only more so” (Allport, 1965, p. 156).
These letters represent an unusually rich source of morphogenic material. For
years, they were subjected to close analysis and study by Allport and his students,
who sought to build the structure of a single personality by identifying personal
dispositions that were central to that person. Allport and his students used three
techniques to look at Jenny’s personality. First, Alfred Baldwin (1942) developed a
technique called personal structure analysis to analyze approximately one third of
the letters. To analyze Jenny’s personal structure, Baldwin used two strictly morpho-
genic procedures, frequency and contiguity, for gathering evidence. The first simply
involves a notation of the frequency with which an item appears in the case material.
For example, how often did Jenny mention Ross, or money, or herself? Contiguity
refers to the proximity of two items in the letters. How often did the category
“Ross—unfavorable” occur in close correspondence with “herself—self-sacrificing”?
Freud and other psychoanalysts intuitively used this technique of contiguity to dis-
cover an association between two items in a patient’s unconscious mind. Baldwin,
however, refined it by determining statistically those correspondences that occur
more frequently than could be expected by chance alone.
Using the personal structure analysis, Baldwin identified three clusters of
categories in Jenny’s letters. The first related to Ross, women, the past, and herself—
self-sacrificing. The second dealt with Jenny’s search for a job, and the third
cluster revolved around her attitude toward money and death. The three clusters
are independent of each other even though a single topic, such as money, may
appear in all three clusters.
Second, Jeffrey Paige (1966) used a factor analysis to extract primary personal
dispositions revealed by Jenny’s letters. In all, Paige identified eight factors: aggres-
sion, possessiveness, affiliation, autonomy, familial acceptance, sexuality, sentience,
and martyrdom. Paige’s study is interesting because he identified eight factors, a
number that corresponds very well with the number of central dispositions—5 to
10—that Allport had earlier hypothesized would be found in most people.
The third method of studying Jenny’s letters was a commonsense technique
used by Allport (1965). His results are quite similar to those of Baldwin and
Paige. Allport asked 36 judges to list what they thought were Jenny’s essential
characteristics. They recorded 198 descriptive adjectives, many of which were
synonymous and overlapping. Allport then grouped the terms into eight clusters:
(1) quarrelsome-suspicious, (2) self-centered (possessive), (3) independent-
autonomous, (4) dramatic-intense, (5) aesthetic-artistic, (6) aggressive, (7) cynical-
morbid, and (8) sentimental.