Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionIV. Dispositional Theories 13. Allport: Psychology of
the Individual© The McGraw−Hill^397
Companies, 2009and her personality. The early letters showed that she was deeply concerned with
money, death, and Ross. She felt that Ross was ungrateful and that he had abandoned
her for another woman, and a prostitute at that! She continued her bitterness toward
him until he and his wife were divorced. She then moved into the apartment next to
Ross’s and for a short time Jenny was happy. But soon Ross was seeing other women,
and Jenny inevitably found something wrong with each. Her letters were filled again
with animosity for Ross, a suspicious and cynical attitude toward others, and a mor-
bid yet dramatic approach to life.
Three years into the correspondence, Ross suddenly died. After his death,
Jenny’s letters expressed a somewhat more favorable attitude toward her son. Now
she did not have to share him with anyone. Now he was safe—no more prostitutes.
For the next 8 years, Jenny continued writing to Glenn and Isabel, and they
usually answered her. However, they served mostly as neutral listeners and not as ad-
visors or confidantes. Jenny continued to be overly concerned with death and money.
She increasingly blamed others for her misery and intensified her suspicions and
hostility toward her caregivers. After Jenny died, Isabel (Ada) commented that, in the
end, Jenny was “the same only more so” (Allport, 1965, p. 156).
These letters represent an unusually rich source of morphogenic material. For
years, they were subjected to close analysis and study by Allport and his students,
who sought to build the structure of a single personality by identifying personal dis-
positions that were central to that person. Allport and his students used three tech-
niques to look at Jenny’s personality. First, Alfred Baldwin (1942) developed a tech-
nique called personal structure analysisto analyze approximately one third of the
letters. To analyze Jenny’s personal structure, Baldwin used two strictly morphogenic
procedures, frequency and contiguity, for gathering evidence. The first simply in-
volves a notation of the frequency with which an item appears in the case material.
For example, how often did Jenny mention Ross, or money, or herself? Contiguity
refers to the proximity of two items in the letters. How often did the category
“Ross—unfavorable” occur in close correspondence with “herself—self-sacrificing”?
Freud and other psychoanalysts intuitively used this technique of contiguity to dis-
cover an association between two items in a patient’s unconscious mind. Baldwin,
however, refined it by determining statistically those correspondences that occur
more frequently than could be expected by chance alone.
Using the personal structure analysis, Baldwin identified three clusters of cat-
egories in Jenny’s letters. The first related to Ross, women, the past, and herself—
self-sacrificing.The second dealt with Jenny’s search for a job,and the third cluster
revolved around her attitude toward money and death.The three clusters are inde-
pendent of each other even though a single topic, such as money, may appear in all
three clusters.
Second, Jeffrey Paige (1966) used a factor analysis to extract primary personal
dispositions revealed by Jenny’s letters. In all, Paige identified eight factors: aggres-
sion, possessiveness, affiliation, autonomy, familial acceptance, sexuality, sentience,
and martyrdom. Paige’s study is interesting because he identified eight factors, a
number that corresponds very well with the number of central dispositions—5 to
10—that Allport had earlier hypothesized would be found in most people.
The third method of studying Jenny’s letters was a commonsense technique
used by Allport (1965). His results are quite similar to those of Baldwin and
Paige. Allport asked 36 judges to list what they thought were Jenny’s essential
Chapter 13 Allport: Psychology of the Individual 391