196 Personality
In developing his list of personality variables, Murray
made a deliberate analogy to organic chemistry (1938,
p. 142). His list of motives and traits was seen as a limited
number ofelementscapable of combining with each other and
environmental press, producing an almost infinite number of
complex and unique individual personality-environment
“compounds”—that is, individual lives. On the other hand,
subsequent personality psychologists mostly confined their
attention to the short list of personality elements rather than
the enormous variety of person-environment compounds.
This would be analogous to chemists focusing only on the
abstract characteristics of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and
nitrogen, considered in isolation—appropriate for the early
weeks of secondary school chemistry, perhaps, but hardly
organic chemistry!
Taking Murray’s metaphor seriously would lead personal-
ity psychology in the direction of studying these many and var-
ied individual lives, just as organic chemists attend to the many
and varied emergent properties of an enormous number of or-
ganic compounds. (As mentioned above, Murray actually in-
troduced several concepts, such as need-integrate, regnancy,
ordination, and gratuity, that could facilitate the study of
personality-in-context in individual lives, but these concepts
were never seriously developed and elaborated, either by
Murray or by later generations of personality psychologists.)
A similar perspective has emerged recently from the discovery
that human complexity is generated by a surprisingly small
number of genes:
The key to complexity is not more genes, but more combinations
and interactions generated by fewer units of code—and many of
these interactions (as emergent properties, to use the technical
jargon) must be explained at the level of their appearance, for
they cannot be predicted from the separate underlying parts
alone. So organisms must be explained as organisms, and not as
a summation of genes. (Gould, 2001)At the beginning of the twenty-first century, then, we have
come to recognize that personality involves complex interac-
tions among elements and contexts in ways that, over time,
are to some extent irreversible (or at least only reversible
with greater difficulty than acquisition) and cannot be ade-
quately described with simplistic, positivistic conceptions of
science. We believe that these complexities—of personality
and of psychological science—have energized a renewed
interest in the individual lives approach to understanding per-
sonality. At the same time, we believe that no one should un-
derestimate the difficulty of studying lives with traditional
and valuable standards of scientific objectivity and rigor—to
develop, as Allport suggested, a true science of the single
case. Perhaps in the next century, the field will benefit from
the increased popularity and accessibility of chaos theory
(also called complexity theory) and its associated mathemat-
ical concepts (e.g., Nowak & Vallacher, 1998) as alternatives
to classical psychometric procedures and rules.
Finally, we suggest that to understand contexts and the
way they shape the level and expression of personality di-
mensions within individual lives will involve us in making
acquaintance with and giving serious study to many other
disciplines: for example, anthropology, sociology, gender
studies, political science, history, economics, religion, even
architecture and geography. To do justice to the whole range
of human experience, we believe, the study of individual
lives in personality psychology must become again, as it
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