178 Personality
still more desirable to trace the development of the successful
people, the great people, the lovely people, the splendid
people of all sorts?” (1929, p. 10). To illustrate his point, and
to introduce important topics in psychology, he presented a
“biographical sketch” of Gene Stratton-Porter, “a successful
writer of popular novels, and also of nature studies, essays
and poems” (p. 10). After mentioning several topics sug-
gested by Stratton-Porter’s life history, however, Woodworth
made sure to caution his readers that “a single case is not
enough to warrant any general conclusions” (p. 19). “We
have given so much space to the case history method in this
introduction,” he continued,
not because it is the preferred method in psychology, for it is the
least rather than the most preferred, but because it can give us
what we want at the outset, a bird’s-eye view of the field, with
some indication of the topics that are deserving of closer exami-
nation. (p. 19)In the ensuing 12 chapters of the text, Woodworth examined
the “deserving” topics but made no further reference to the
case of Gene Stratton-Porter.
Preceding by several years the full establishment of
the field of personality psychology in the mid-1930s,
Woodworth’s text (first published in 1921) outsold all others
for 25 years (Boring, 1950), and his definitions of method-
ological concepts served as prototypes for other textbook au-
thors (Winston, 1988). Indeed, Woodworth’s attention to
personality, his role in designing what is generally considered
the first personality inventory (the Personal Data Sheet;
Woodworth, 1919, 1932), and his ambivalent treatment of the
case history method—as the least preferred method, but the
one best suited to “give us what we want at the outset”
(Woodworth, 1929, p. 19)—have a distinctly modern ring. In
recent years, personality researchers with an interest in case
studies, life histories, and psychobiography have raised in-
triguing questions regarding the ambivalence of American
personality psychologists toward the study of individual lives
(Elms, 1994; McAdams, 1988, 1997; McAdams & West,
1997; Runyan, 1997). For example, McAdams and West ob-
serve that “from the beginning, personality psychologists
have had a love/hate relationship with the case study”
(p. 760). Such ambivalence, they suggest, is inconsistent with
the views of Gordon Allport (1937b) and Henry Murray
(1938), whose canonical texts defined the new field of per-
sonality psychology in the 1930s: “It is ironic that the field
defined as the scientific study of the individual person should
harbor deep ambivalence about the very business of examin-
ing cases of individual persons’ lives” (McAdams & West,
1997, p. 761). (Personality psychologists other than Allport
and Murray shared this definition of the field. For example, in
a third text that signaled the emergence of the new field,
Stagner remarked, “The object of our study is a single human
being” [1937, p. viii].)
Ambivalence regarding the study of individual lives also
seems incompatible with personality theorists’ “dissident role
in the development of psychology” (C. S. Hall & Lindzey,
1957, p. 4; see McAdams, 1997) and their concern with “the
study of the whole person,” which Hall and Lindzey (p. 6)
consider “a natural derivative of [the] clinical practice” of
early personality theorists such as Freud, Jung, and Adler. Yet
Hall and Lindzey’s major text, Theories of Personality
(1957), “gave almost no attention to the study of individual
persons or lives” (Runyan, 1997, p. 41). Runyan suggests that
personality psychologists in the 1950s and 1960s lost sight of
the study of individual lives, the “central focus” of Allport
and Murray, turning instead to “psychometric concerns and
the experimental study of particular processes” (p. 41; see
also Lamiell on the dominance of the individual differences
approach, which he considers “ill-suited to the task of ad-
vancing theories of individual behavior/psychological func-
tioning” [1997, p. 118], the goal of personality psychology).
Craik (1986) notes that biographical and archival approaches
were featured regularly in studies of personality during the
1930s and early 1940s but showed a “pattern of interrupted
development in the post–World War II era followed by a
vigorous contemporary re-emergence” (p. 27).
While observers generally agree regarding personality
psychologists’ ambivalence toward the study of individual
lives, the historical course of this ambivalence remains
somewhat unclear. Have personality psychologists had a rel-
atively constant “love/hate relationship” with studies of indi-
vidual lives “from the beginning” (McAdams & West, 1997,
p. 760), or have they shown interest in such studies during
some historical periods (e.g., the 1930s and 1940s) and ne-
glected them during others (e.g., the 1950s and 1960s)? At
what point did psychometric methods become predominant
in personality research? And how can we explain the “puz-
zling history” (Runyan, 1997, p. 41) of American personality
psychologists’ tendency to neglect the study of individual
lives? What historical, cultural, institutional, and personal
factors have contributed to their ambivalence? Runyan sug-
gests a number of factors but emphasizes the need for “more
detailed research on the intellectual and institutional history
of personality psychology” (p. 42).
In this chapter, we consider several pieces of this histori-
cal puzzle. We begin by examining the formative period of
personality research between 1900 and 1930. As Parker
(1991) suggests, this period has received scant attention in
historical reviews of American personality psychology,