180 Personality
The 1920s saw “the culmination on a mass scale of public
interest in personal, introspective accounts of private ex-
periences” and the development of “a mass market for popu-
larized personal documents” (Burnham, 1968b, p. 368).
Americans read magazines such as True Story(Krueger,
1925), first published in 1919 (Ernst, 1991), and Personality:
A Magazine of Biography,published from 1927 to 1928 and
edited by Ralph Henry Graves, who in 1934 published a bi-
ography of Henry Ford—an emblematic figure of the “cul-
ture of personality” (Susman, 1979, p. 223). They sought
advice from publications on popular systems of character
analysis such as graphology, the interpretation of personality
from handwriting (see Thornton, 1996, who suggests that
graphologists’ romantic view of handwriting as a reflection of
the unique individual offered more comfort to Americans
than did psychologists’ measures of individual differences).
The “new psychology,” which borrowed concepts of hidden
human motives from psychoanalysis, became “one of the
characteristic fads of the age” (Burnham, 1968b, p. 352).
“Candid and confessional autobiographical fragments were
central in popular expositions of psychoanalysis,” and case
reports “had all the appeal—and more—of true confessions”
(p. 368). Public fascination with psychoanalysis was symbol-
ized in 1924 by the appearance of Freud on the cover of Time
magazine (Fancher, 2000).
Academic and professional cultures, too, reflected a con-
cern with personality. James C. Johnston, for example, noted
“the wide vogue” of biography (1927, p. x), “the literature of
personality” (pp. xi–xii), and argued for the establishment
of separate departments of biography, such as those that
had been recently established at Carleton College and at
Dartmouth (see the introduction to Johnston’s book by bi-
ographer Gamaliel Bradford, 1927). Personality became a
central concept in academic and professional fields such as
psychopathology and psychiatry (Taylor, 2000), sociology
(Barenbaum, 2000), education (Danziger, 1990), and social
work (Richmond, 1922; V. P. Robinson, 1930), and in the
mental hygiene movement (Cohen, 1983), as well as in psy-
chology (Nicholson, 1997, 1998, 2000). Following Freud’s
visit to America in 1909, many of these fields began to reflect
the influence of psychoanalysis (see, e.g., Danziger, 1997;
Hale, 1971; Lubove, 1965; Shakow & Rapaport, 1964).
It is important to note the multidisciplinary nature of per-
sonality studies during the formative period of personality
psychology. (Craik, 1986, makes a similar point but uses the
term “interdisciplinary” instead of “multidisciplinary”; we
use the latter term to suggest that research on personality was
conducted in many disciplines, whether or not it involved
cross-disciplinary collaboration.) At this time, the boundaries
between psychology and disciplines such as sociology and
psychiatry were unclear. For example, both psychology and
sociology developed subfields of “social psychology” during
this period (see the chapter by Morawski & Bayer in this vol-
ume), and social psychologists in both disciplines considered
personality a primary topic of research (Barenbaum, 2000).
Indeed, as late as the 1930s, according to Smith (1997),
“there was little clear separation between sociology and
psychology” in personality research, despite a general ten-
dency toward separation of sociological and psychological
social psychology (see also Good, 2000); researchers in both
fields were “driven by the common interest in knowledge to
make possible the individual’s social adjustment” (Smith,
1997, p. 765).
In the following sections, we examine methodological
choices regarding the study of individual lives in several
areas in which personality became a central concept during
the first three decades of the twentieth century—psychiatry
and psychopathology, sociology and social work, the inter-
disciplinary mental hygiene movement, and psychology.
There are, of course, other areas we might have included. For
example, in anthropology, life history research aroused some
interest following the publication of Radin’s (1926) Crashing
Thunder,but it became popular only in the 1930s and 1940s
(Hudson, 1973). We have chosen to treat in more depth the
reception of case studies and life histories between 1900 and
1930 in areas closely related to psychology.Psychiatry and PsychopathologyThe term “personality” appeared rarely in the general psycho-
logical literature before the second decade of the twentieth
century, and during the first decade it “typically had a collo-
quial meaning that was synonymous with ‘soul’ or ‘self’ ”
(Parker, 1991, p. 40). Between 1910 and 1920, however, it
began to appear in discussions of “psychiatric and abnormal
psychology topics” (p. 42) and in reviews of books on psy-
choanalysis (Parker’s observations are based on a survey of
articles in thePsychological Bulletinand thePsychological
Reviewbetween 1900 and 1920). It is important to remember
that during this period, abnormal and clinical psychology
were not central areas of academic psychology, as they are
today. Some American psychologists were interested in
psychopathology and psychotherapy (Hale, 1971; Taylor,
1996, 2000); one notable example is William James, who was
trained in medicine and taught a course in psychopathology at
Harvard beginning in 1893 (Taylor, 1996). (Woodworth,
1932, mentions having taken James’s course as a graduate
student.) In general, however, abnormal psychology was
considered to be a medical subfield rather than an area of
psychology, and the profession of clinical psychology was