Promoting the Study of Individual Lives: Gordon Allport and Henry Murray 189view, an environmental press typically elicited an individual
need; this sequence was termed a thema. Thus, for example:
press Rejection →need Affiliation. (Alternatively, for some
people the thema might be: press Rejection →need Rejec-
tion.) At the most abstract level was the concept of unity-
thema, an underlying press →needs reaction system that is
the “key to [each individual’s] unique nature.... By the
observation of many parts one finally arrives at a conception
of the whole and, then, having grasped the latter, one can
re-interpret and understand the former” (Murray, 1938,
p. 604–605; emphasis in original).
The Study of Individual Lives in the 1930s
and 1940s... and Later
We have suggested that during the first three decades of the
twentieth century, psychologists were reluctant to adopt
methods of studying individual personalities. Were these
methods more widely accepted in the 1930s and 1940s (see,
e.g., Craik, 1986)? In this section we examine the reception
of Allport’s and Murray’s texts and reassess the status of case
studies and life histories in personality psychology during
this period.
Reception of Allport’s and Murray’s Texts
As we have seen, Allport’s early publications promoting case
methods were generally overlooked by personality psycholo-
gists; in contrast, his Ascendance-Submission (G. W. Allport,
1928) and Study of Values (G. W. Allport & Vernon, 1931)
tests were very successful (see, e.g., Bernreuter, 1933; Duffy,
1940). Reviewers of Allport’s (1937b) book recognized it as
a foundational text for the new field of personality psychol-
ogy (e.g., Cantril, 1938; Hollingworth, 1938; Jenkins, 1938),
but his emphasis on the study of the individual drew sharp
criticism. J. P. Guilford, for example, considered it “a revolt
against science” (1938, p. 416; see also Bills, 1938; Paterson,
1938; Skaggs, 1945). Similarly, Richard M. Elliott (1939) ap-
proved of Murray’s (1938) efforts to combine psychoanalytic
and experimental approaches, his procedures (especially the
Thematic Apperception Test), and his catalog of variables,
but he criticized Murray’s neglect of psychometric research
and of statistics. Elliott found the case study of Earnst too
speculative.
Elliott’s criticism reflected his own ambivalence regarding
the study of individual lives in personality psychology.
Around 1938, he had begun teaching a course entitled
Biographical Psychology, relying on biographies, autobiog-
raphies, and fiction and requiring that his students prepare a
biographical study. However, he referred to the course as a
clinical offering, described it as highly unorthodox, and was
greatly relieved to learn that his students were also taking
more traditional psychology courses (Elliott, 1952).Allport: Ambivalence or Accommodation?Although Allport may have had some ambivalence regarding
case studies (see, e.g., Barenbaum, 1997a; Cohler, 1993;
Nicholson, 1996, in press), his unpublished record suggests
that his failure to publish more than one case study was
largely an accommodation to the prevailing climate in psy-
chology, which continued to be unsupportive of such meth-
ods. His correspondence reveals that he hoped to follow his
text with a volume on the methodology of case studies and
life histories, including case materials for use in courses in
psychology and social work (e.g., G. W. Allport, 1937a). In
addition to the case of Jenny Masterson (G. W. Allport, 1965;
Anonymous, 1946), he collected extensive materials on a
second case that remained unpublished (Barenbaum, 1997a).
In 1938 and 1940, Allport conducted seminars on the life his-
tory and the case method, working with his students to
expand his list of “rules and criteria for the writing of scien-
tific case studies” and design research concerning “reliability,
validity, and the most effective methods for utilizing raw ac-
counts of personality” (G. W. Allport, 1940a; see Barenbaum,
1997a). Examples of this research include studies by
Cartwright and French (1939) and Polansky (1941). Al-
though Allport (1967) later suggested that the rules for case
studies had proved unsatisfactory and were therefore never
published, in fact he submitted them to his publisher,
along with several sample cases. When the publisher doubted
that such a volume would be marketable (Allport, 1941;
MacMurphey, 1941), describing himself as “the victim of
an obsession” (courtesy of the Harvard University Archives),
replied that he had to complete it whether or not it could
be published (the rules were eventually published by
Garraty, 1981).
Instead, he accepted a request to write a monograph on the
use of personal documents in psychology (G. W. Allport,
1942) for the SSRC, noting that “to the best of my knowledge
I am the only psychologist who has worked extensively with
the methodological problem you raise” (1940a). He saw the
monograph, written amidst the increasing press of work re-
lated to the U.S. involvement in World War II, as a beginning:
“To render the logic of the case method acceptable to hard-
headed American empiricists is a long and difficult job”
(1941; quoted in Hevern, 1999, p. 14). Allport argued that
personal documents provided knowledge of “concrete indi-
viduals.... in their natural complexity,” an “essential first
step” in psychology (1942, p. 56), and that they could “aid in