188 Personality
Explorations in Personality (Murray, 1938), a study of
51 young men by his interdisciplinary team and one of the
first major systematic research studies of normal personality.
Variable-Centered Concepts. Explorations in Person-
alityis most often cited nowadays for its list of 20-plus mo-
tives or “needs.” For example, this catalog of motives formed
the basis of numerous personality questionnaire measures,
such as the Stern Activities Index, the Edwards Personal
Preference Schedule (EPPS), and the Jackson Personality
Research Form (PRF). David McClelland and his colleagues
developed thematic apperceptive measures of three major
motives (achievement, affiliation, and power) from Murray’s
list of needs (see Winter, 1998b).
Actually, motives were only one part of an extensive,
101-page catalog of “variables of personality” (Murray,
1938, pp. 142–242), which also included other concepts
(discussed below) such as need-integrates, general traits or
attributes, “miscellaneous internal factors,” and numerous
other variables such as values, sentiments, interests, “gratu-
ities,” abilities, and complexes. (At the conclusion of the
description of these variables, Murray wrote, “No one who
has had the patience to read through this section can be
expected to come away from it now with a clear head”
[1938, p. 230].)
Person-Centered Procedures.In addition to its wealth
of dimensional contributions, the Explorationsproject also
presented an elaborate series of procedures, developed or
adapted by Murray and his collaborators, for describing and
assessing individual persons (Murray, 1938, pp. 397–603).
Some (such as tests of hypnotic susceptibility or level of as-
piration) yielded simple scores, like traditional dimensional
tests. Many other procedures, however, lent themselves more
to configurational or narrative interpretation: for example, a
group conference with the person being studied, informal
conversations, an autobiography, the Thematic Apperception
Test (TAT), and a Dramatic Productions Test (developed by
Erik Erikson; see Homburger, 1937).
The final stage in the assessment of each person was thor-
oughly centered on the unique and complex structure of the in-
dividual. After all information on a person had been collected,
a “biographer” prepared a “psychograph,” defined as an “ab-
stract biography” (Murray, 1938, pp. 605–606) or “recon-
struction of the subject’s personality from birth” (p. 29); this
definition, which emphasized the person-centered approach,
was quite different from the nomothetic definition of “psycho-
graph” as a profile of trait scores (see, e.g., F. H. Allport &
G. W. Allport, 1921; for an application of both approaches to
the description of an individual person, see McClelland, 1951,
especially pp. 589, 591). A five-person diagnostic council then
discussed the person, often for five or six hours, and voted on
final ratings for that person on all personality variables. (The
reliance on a diagnostic council’s discussion, rather than more
quantitative, and thus dimensional, methods was one reason
why Harvard psychologists Karl Lashley and Edwin Boring
voted against tenure for Murray; see F. G. Robinson, 1992,
p. 225). Only one such case, that of “Earnst” (written by
Robert White), was actually presented inExplorations,but it
was presented at considerable length: At 88 pages, it took up
11% of the book’s entire text. Because of space limitations,
other cases had to be eliminated from the final version of the
book (Robinson, 1992).Person-Centered Concepts. While most of the vari-
ables in Murray’s catalog lent themselves to elaboration in a
nomothetic direction, several concepts were particularly ap-
propriate to the intensive study of individual lives. For exam-
ple, the concept of need-integratereferred to the compound
of a motive along with its customary emotions, preferred
modes of action, and familiar related goal objects (1938,
pp. 109–110). While the motive itself (e.g., achievement, af-
filiation, power) may be universal—that is, present in varying
amounts in most people—the remaining components of emo-
tion, action modes, and objects would be different for differ-
ent people. Thus, the need-integrate concept individualizes
the more nomothetic concept of motive. (Murray used the
term “complex” in a similar fashion.)
Murray defined gratuityas a “gratuitous end situation,”
that is, an unnaturally easy goal-attainment due to factors
such as inheritance or luck. Such gratuities are “common in
the lives of the over-privileged” (1938, pp. 62, 112n; see also
p. 228). The gratuity concept has the potential to link indi-
vidual personalities to the opportunities, demands, and re-
sources of their environments, thereby making it possible to
incorporate race and class privilege (or, conversely, race and
class oppression) into the personality portrait.
Several concepts refer to the hierarchical and temporal
arrangement of people’s motives; for example, regnancy,
where one motive dominates others (Murray, 1938, pp. 45–49);
relations offusion, subsidiation,andconflictamong different
motives at any one time (pp. 86–89); andtime-bindingorordi-
nation(p. 49; see also Murray, 1959), by which processes
different motives are arranged into long-term temporal
sequences, “strategies,” orserial proceedings(Murray, 1959).
These concepts make it possible to chart, with a relatively small
number of basic motives and other personality characteristics,
an almost infinite range of individuality over the life course.
Murray conceptualized the forces and stimuli of the envi-
ronment in terms of perceived and actual press. In Murray’s