Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionIV. Dispositional Theories 13. Allport: Psychology of
the Individual© The McGraw−Hill^381
Companies, 2009I
n the fall of 1920, a 22-year-old American philosophy and economics student was
visiting with an older brother in Vienna. During his visit, the young man penned
a note to Sigmund Freud requesting an appointment. Freud, then the world’s most
famous psychiatrist, agreed to see the young man and suggested a specific time for
a meeting.
The young American arrived at No. 19 Berggasse in plenty of time for his ap-
pointment with Dr. Freud. At the designated time, Freud opened the door to his con-
sulting room and quietly ushered the young man inside. The American visitor sud-
denly realized that he had nothing to say. Searching his mind for some incident that
might interest Freud, he remembered seeing a small boy on the tram car that day
while traveling to Freud’s home. The little boy, about 4 years old, displayed an ob-
vious dirt phobia, constantly complaining to his well-starched mother about the
filthy conditions on the car. Freud listened silently to the story and then—with a typ-
ical Freudian technique—asked his young visitor if he was in reality talking about
himself. Feeling guilty, the young man managed to change the subject and to escape
without too much further embarrassment.
The American visitor to Freud’s consulting room was Gordon Allport, and this
encounter was the spark that ignited his interest in personality theory. Back in the
United States, Allport began to wonder if there might be room for a third approach
to personality, one that borrowed from traditional psychoanalysis and animal-driven
learning theories, but also one that adopted a more humanistic stance. Allport
quickly completed work for a PhD in psychology and embarked on a long and dis-
tinguished career as a staunch advocate for the study of the individual.
Overview of Allport’s Psychology
of the Individual
More than any other personality theorist, Gordon Allport emphasized the uniqueness
of the individual.He believed that attempts to describe people in terms of general
traits rob them of their unique individuality. For this reason, Allport objected to trait
and factor theories that tend to reduce individual behaviors to common traits. He in-
sisted, for example, that one person’s stubbornness is different from any other per-
son’s stubbornness and the manner in which one person’s stubbornness interacts with
his or her extraversion and creativity is duplicated by no other individual.
Consistent with Allport’s emphasis on each person’s uniqueness was his will-
ingness to study in depth a single individual. He called the study of the individual
morphogenic scienceand contrasted it with the nomotheticmethods used by most
other psychologists. Morphogenic methods are those that gather data on a single in-
dividual,whereas nomothetic methods gather data on groups of people. Allport also
advocated an eclecticapproach to theory building. He accepted some of the contri-
butions of Freud, Maslow, Rogers, Eysenck, Skinner, and others; but he believed that
no one of these theorists is able to adequately explain the total growing and unique
personality. To Allport, a broad, comprehensive theory is preferable to a narrow, spe-
cific theory even if it does not generate as many testable hypotheses.
Allport argued against particularism, or theories that emphasize a single aspect
of personality. In an important warning to other theorists, he cautioned them not to
“forget what you have decided to neglect” (Allport, 1968, p. 23).
Chapter 13 Allport: Psychology of the Individual 375