192 Personality
Gordon Allport’s and Henry Murray’s efforts to promote
studies of individual lives were initially less successful than
their efforts to systematize the new subfield. While generally
agreeing that the goal of personality psychology was to un-
derstand the individual person, other authors of personality
texts during this period, like Woodworth (1929) before them,
used case studies for illustrative purposes (see McAdams &
West, 1997) but continued to describe them as clinical
methods rather than as research methods. Although several
students and colleagues of Allport and Murray explored
methods of studying individual lives, attention to these meth-
ods during the 1930s and 1940s reflected primarily the inter-
ests of sociologists (particularly those involved with the
SSRC) and European psychologists rather than a more gen-
eral acceptance of these methods by American personality
psychologists.
Without these external supports, methods of studying in-
dividual lives received even less attention from personality
psychologists during the post–World War II period, which
saw an increase in the use of survey and quantitative tech-
niques in the social sciences (Platt, 1992, 1996). Although
Allport’s monograph on personal documents (G. W. Allport,
1942) fueled controversy regarding clinical versus statistical
prediction during the 1940s and 1950s, it appears to have had
more of an impact on clinical psychologists than on personal-
ity researchers (e.g., O’Connell, 1958). The post–World
War II expansion of clinical psychology contributed to the
continuation of the prediction debate, but, ironically, drew at-
tention away from Allport’s goal of developing idiographic
research methods in personality psychology. As Allport ob-
served later, “We stop with our wobbly laws of personality
and seldom confront them with the concrete person” (G. W.
Allport, 1962a, p. 407).
Revival of the Study of Individual Lives in
Personality Psychology
There are signs of a resurgence of interest in the study of
individual lives on the part of personality psychologists.
Psychobiography, a topic of special interest to political psy-
chologists and many historians, had continued to grow and
flourish since its beginnings in the early twentieth century.
Erikson’s studies of Luther (1958) and Gandhi (1969) were
widely viewed as models of how to study individuals through
the combined lenses of personality psychology and history.
Other examples include studies of Woodrow Wilson (George
& George, 1956), George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev
(Winter, Hermann, Weintraub, & Walker, 1991a, 1991b), four
U.S. foreign policy advisors (Elms, 1986), U.S. president Bill
Clinton (Suedfeld, 1994), and Adolf Hitler (W. Langer, 1972).
(Much of Langer’s work was based on earlier studies of
Hitler by Murray, whose work was not acknowledged by
Langer; see F. G. Robinson, 1992, pp. 275–278, also Murray,
1943.) Several books and articles contain lists of psychobio-
graphical studies (Cocks & Crosby, 1987, especially pp.
217–222; Craik, 1988; Crosby & Crosby, 1981; Elms, 1994;
Friedman, 1994; Glad, 1973; Greenstein, 1969, especially
p. 72; Howe, 1997; McAdams & Ochberg, 1988; Runyan,
1982, 1988a, 1988b, 1990, 1997; Simonton, 1999; and Stone
& Schaffner, 1988). Greenstein (1969, chap. 3) provides a
model for the tasks of description and analysis in construct-
ing individual psychobiographical case studies, and Winter
(2000) reviews recent developments.
Beginning in the 1980s, however, this wave of interest in
psychobiography began to enter the mainstream, as personal-
ity psychologists explored how psychobiography and studies
of individual persons could enrich their field. Runyan (1981)
used the question of why nineteenth-century Dutch painter
Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear as the basis for a discussion
of how to gather and evaluate evidence, and how to decide
among rival explanations of specific actions of particular
individuals. In Life Histories and Psychobiography: Explo-
rations in Theory and Method, Runyan (1982) reviewed
methodological problems, addressed criticisms, and sug-
gested guidelines for the evaluation and preparation of case
studies, life histories, and psychobiographical studies. West
(1983) edited a special issue of the Journal of Personality
devoted to idiographic methods. A few years later, McAdams
and Ochberg (1988) edited another special issue of the same
journal, on psychobiography and life narratives, with papers
devoted to analysis of earlier work, methodological sugges-
tions, and studies of particular individuals.
Over the next decade, several collections of case studies
appeared—often inspired by external intellectual influences
and trends; for example, feminist theory (e.g., Franz &
Stewart, 1994; Romero & Stewart, 1999) or hermeneutic-
interpretive and narrative methods (e.g., Josselson &
Lieblich, 1993–1999). At the same time, several new person-
ality textbooks (e.g., McAdams, 1990; Winter, 1996) gave
considerable attention to individual persons, while many
existing texts expanded their use of case study material in
new editions.
In many cases, these studies used quantitative scores from
traditional nomothetic variables to elucidate personality
change and development over time (e.g., Espin, Stewart, &
Gomez, 1990; Stewart, Franz, & Layton, 1988). Sometimes
the use of quantative data helped to resolve paradoxical
behaviors (e.g., the study of Richard Nixon by Winter &
Carlson, 1988) or explain surprising outcomes (e.g., the study
of Bill Clinton by Winter, 1998a). And studies by Stolorow