Promoting the Study of Individual Lives: Gordon Allport and Henry Murray 187status. But he noted that even a general law could be one that
explained “how uniqueness comes about”; for example, the
principle of functional autonomy, which suggests that mo-
tives become independent of their origins in “infantile” or “ar-
chaic” drives (p. 194; emphasis in original), accounts for
unique personal motives. Allport also pointed out psycholo-
gists’ neglect of laws that applied to particular individuals:
“The course of each life is a lawful event, even though it is un-
like all others of its class” (p. 558). The study of individual
lives, he suggested, would enable psychologists to make bet-
ter predictions of individual behavior, one of the goals of sci-
entific psychology.
Allport saw the case study as the psychologist’s “final
affirmation of the individuality and uniqueness of every per-
sonality” (G. W. Allport, 1937b, p. 390). Clinicians and soci-
ologists, he argued, had developed the method with a focus
on “maladjustments” or on “social influences surrounding the
individual” (p. 390) rather than on personality itself. Focus-
ing within the person, he chose to overlook “the factors shap-
ingpersonality” (p. viii; emphasis in original). This neglect
of cultural and social contexts reflected the emerging person-
ality ideal (Nicholson, 1998, in press) and the psychological
Zeitgeist (for example, Allport’s text was more successful
than that of Stagner, 1937, who emphasized social and
cultural factors; see Barenbaum, 2000). Ironically, however,
it may have resulted in case studies that were one-sided (see
our discussion of context later in the chapter).
Henry Murray’s Personology and the Study of Lives
Like Allport, Henry Murray (1893–1988) developed an ap-
proach to personality that emphasized both the study of indi-
vidual differences and the integrative understanding of
individual persons. Also like Allport, Murray brought to per-
sonality psychology interests, skills, and experiences drawn
from a variety of other fields—perspectives that led him to
emphasize the study of individuals. Indeed, for Murray, the
study of individual life histories wasthe psychology of
personality, or (as he preferred to call it) “personology”
(1938, p. 4). (Although “personology,” either as a term or as
a [sub]field, has by and large not entered general use, there is
a small “Society for Personology,” founded by Murray disci-
ples, which is dedicated to the life history approach to the
study of personality.)
Interdisciplinary Roots: Medicine, Literature,
and “Depth Psychology”
Murray was born to wealth and privilege (Anderson, 1988;
Murray, 1967). He was trained as a physician, concerned
with diagnosing and treating individual persons. Even in
medical school, his interest in case studies went well beyond
what was required. For example, he wrote a thoroughly re-
searched, formal medical history and an extensive narrative
account (both unpublished) of the life and circumstances of a
prostitute who was dying of syphilis (see F. G. Robinson,
1992, pp. 63–65).
Murray’s strong literary and artistic interests also rein-
forced his emphasis on the study of individuals. A chance en-
counter during an ocean voyage in 1924 led him to read
Moby-Dick;thus began a lifetime’s passionate interest in the
life and writings of Herman Melville (F. G. Robinson, 1992,
pp. 81–82, 109–110, 133–140, and passim). Over the next six
decades, Murray published an introduction to Melville’s
Pierreas well as reviews of several books about Melville.
An almost casual dinner-party discussion led Murray to
buy Carl Jung’s recently published Psychological Types
(1923/1971). Two years later, he visited Jung in Zurich, meet-
ing and socializing daily for three weeks (F. G. Robinson,
1992). Thus began a fascination with “depth psychology”
(Jung and Freud; also Otto Rank, Alfred Adler, and others; see
Murray, 1938, pp. 24–25) that was decisive in leading him
away from medicine and physiology to psychology as a life
vocation. While Murray did not incorporate Jung’s specific
types into his conceptual scheme of personality (Murray,
1938, pp. 238, 726–727), the concept oftype,involvingcate-
gories of whole personsrather than tables of component
“elements,” did create a path, for Murray (1955) and other per-
sonality psychologists, toward the study of molar units—that
is, the whole lives of individual persons. By focusing on per-
sons rather than variables, then, type is a quasi-dimensional,
quantitative method that maintains the individual person
perspective while also permitting comparison (Platt, 1992,
describes sociologists’ similar efforts to classify and compare
cases). Jung’s typology is probably the best-known example,
but from time to time other personality theorists have sug-
gested typologies (for example, Freud, 1908/1959, on the anal
character type, 1916/1957b, on character types, 1931/1961, on
libidinal types; Rank, 1931/1936, on the “artist,” “neurotic,”
and “average” types; and Block, 1971, on normal personality
types). And although the concept of type is not currently fash-
ionable in personality research, there are signs that its useful-
ness is being recognized—or rediscovered (see Thorne &
Gough, 1991; York & John, 1992).The “Explorations” ProjectAt the Harvard Psychological Clinic during the 1930s,
Murray gathered an extraordinary group of more than two
dozen collaborators, including a sociologist, an anthropolo-
gist, a physician, a poet, and psychologists of widely varying
backgrounds and approaches. They produced the landmark