Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport And The Science Of Selfhood

E-Book Overview

Inventing Personality examines the early career of Gordon Allport (1897-1967) to reveal the history of the personality category he championed. Drawing on an extensive array of previously unpublished biographical materials, Nicholson masterfully combines biography with intellectual history to reveal the ways in which Allport's science was embedded in the cultural politics of America in the 1920s and the 1930s. He argues that personality's emergence as an object of science was linked to the gradual demise of character and the self-sacrificing, morally grounded self that it supported. Carefully highlighting Allport's complex commitments to both science and spirituality, Nicholson examines the rich cultural and historical contexts that framed the emergence of personality as a discipline, revealing multiple (even contradictory) meanings of "personality" in the language of American selfhood. He asserts that "personality's" appeal lay in its ability to integrate and obscure the complex polarities of material and spiritual; old and new; masculine and feminine; and freedom and control-categories rendered unstable in a new and distinctively modern age. This book will be invaluable to scholars and practitioners interested in personality, and it will serve as a model of scientific biography.

E-Book Content

INVENTING PERSONALITY Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood Ian A. M. Nicholson American Psychological Association Washington, DC CONTENTS Illustrations ................................................... vii Acknowledgments ............................................. ix Chapter 1. Introduction .................................. 3 Chapter 2 . “Fine Character and Splendid Ideals”: Allport’s Early Years (1897-1915) ....................... 13 Chapter 3. A New World: Harvard (1915-1919) ........... 29 Chapter 4. The Missionary Life: Robert College, Constantinople (1919- 1920) ................... 55 Chapter 5. A Science of Personality: Graduate School (1920- 1922) ................................. 73 Chapter 6. A Psychology of the Spirit: Germany and England (1922-1924) ................................. 103 Chapter 7. Constructing a Category: Personality Psychology at Harvard and Dartmouth (1924-1930) ........ 133 Chapter 8. The Politics of Moderation: Personality Psychology at Harvard (1930-1936) ............ 163 Chapter 9. Personality and Social Crisis (1937-1938) . . . . . . . 191 219 Chapter 10. Conclusion ................................... 227 Notes ........................................................ Bibliography .................................................. Index ........................................................ 265 283 About the Author ............................................ 301 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Figure 11 Figure 12 Figure 13 Figure 14 Figure 15 Figure 16 Figure 17 Figure 18 Figure 19 Nellie Wise, 1886. John Allport, circa 1887. Allport family home and Glenville Hospital, 653 East 105th Street, Cleveland, Ohio, circa 1910. The Allport family restaurant. The youth seated at the counter is Gordon Allport. The new Glenville Hospital, circa 1907. The figure is probably John Allport. Newspaper article, “Women and Their Work.” Mothers Club, Cleveland, Ohio, circa 1905. Nellie Allport is seated on the far left. Lecture ticket for a talk by John Allport. John Allport in Akron, Ohio, circa 1914. “Feminizing boyhood”: Gordon Allport, Hudson, Ohio, age 5. Handwritten note by Gordon Allport, circa 1905. The brothers Allport. Left to right: Gordon, Fayette, Floyd, Harold. Rejecting boy culture: Gordon Allport and an unidentified female friend
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