Brian R. Little
What follows, therefore, is a highly selective recounting of the generative contexts that shaped the development of personal projects analysis and consequently this volume. Because the contexts that stimulate and sustain projects are a core focus of the personal projects approach to studying lives, this seems an appropriately reflexive way to proceed (Bannister, 1966). Also, my students inform me that this way of telling the story gives them an inside feel for what our research is all about. Writing the chapter from this perspective also allows me to acknowledge influences that have shaped my research over the years. These include fortuitous events, evocative institutions, and stimulating individuals. Both goodwill and good luck figure in the story.2
The chapter is in two sections. The opening section is an idiosyncratic account of the roots of the personal projects perspective in which I revisit the scholarly settings and generative contexts that stimulated its core concepts. Although there is a certain degree of arbitrariness and potential distortion in reconstructing the early influences on my work, particularly errors of omission, I have tried to render the account with fidelity. The second section gathers up these cumulative concepts and gives them a more formal treatment. I define and lay out the central notions of the personal projects perspective and the social ecological framework that, together, inform aspects of this book. I give particular attention to an enduring theme throughout my work over the years and developed again in many of the following chaptersâhow personal projects play a pivotal role in human well-being and flourishing. I also note briefly the similarities and differences between personal projects and related units of analysis in personality and developmental science and other areas of research and practice. Finally, I stand back and, from a more synoptic vantage point, discern some patterns that have become clearer as the projects perspective has been adopted and adapted by others. In conclusion, I suggest some consequences that this still moving image has both for the study of lives and for attempts to enhance their vitality.
Personal Projects as Analytic Units: Roots, Routes, and Randomness
The origins of research and theory on personal projects go back more than 30 years and involve several different intellectual influences. Some of these arose directly from my experiences in various scholarly institutions and behavior settings. Others were carried from setting to setting as enduring personal preferences, the most compelling of which has been an irrepressible desire to connect, link, and integrate diverse forms of inquiry: to rub ideas together and, particularly with highly combustible students, to create sparks and see what ensues.
Classical Personology: Snow Flurries, Murray, and Synoptic Visions
C. P. Snowâs (1959) published Rede lecture on âThe Two Culturesâ had a major impact on me as an undergraduate in the early 1960s. Snow, a chemist and novelist, concluded that a growing gap between scientists and humanists was becoming unbridgeable and that the implications for society were ominous. I was struck by Snowâs argument for the tension between the sciences and the humanities but even more by the acrimony that greeted the argument. After a few flurries of disagreement there was a blizzard of ad hominem abuse directed back at Snow, who was seen by some (e.g., Leavis, 1963) as unfit to pronounce on such matters: lacking, it was alleged, distinction in either domain. This seemed much more than an academic disagreement. It reflected fundamental differences in orientation, in committed preferences, in ideology, in preferred modes of knowing and communicating, and in core beliefs about the quality of life and lives. As I had strong interests in both the sciences and the humanities, I vacillated between them before eventually discovering psychology. I was hopeful that this could be a field in which the two cultures might be bridged and creative synergies between the sciences and the humanities might be achieved (Little, 1972, 2005).3
One day in the spring of 1961,1 chanced upon a rather tattered copy of Henry A. Murrayâs (1938) Explorations in Personality in a shop in Victoria, British Columbia, and bought it for 25 cents. I was intrigued by how Murrayâs Psychological Clinic at Harvard had been engaged in the interdisciplinary analysis of human personality that directly met some of the challenges posed by Snow. In essence, Murrayâs vision was for a psychology that looked at individual personality from the perspective of many different researchers, working separately, who then came together in diagnostic councils or assessment panels and attempted to create an integrative picture of the person. It was the diversity of back-grounds of those who contributed to this assessment that was remarkable. They came from the entire spectrum of the academic and artistic community Indeed, in the preface to the volume, Murray (1938) acknowledged both this diversity and the difficulties in finding a common language: âIt is true that we never completely succeeded in merging our separate Ideologies. How could such a thing come to pass in a group composed of poets, physicists, sociologists, anthropologists, criminologists, physicians... ?â (p. xi). That he aspired at all to bring these different specialists to the table was audacious, although not surprising considering Murrayâs professional background. After undergraduate study in history, Murray went into medicine, practiced surgery, took a PhD in biochemistry, and achieved fame as a literary scholar, particularly for his research on Herman Melville. Here, clearly, was a person driving projects designed to confront and survive Snow storms. I would later come to believe bridging between the disciplines would require more than the bringing together of different specialists. It would require, as Murrayâs illustrious colleague at Harvard, Gordon Allport (1937, 1958) argued, appropriate units of analysis that facilitate interdisciplinary analysis. Nevertheless, Murrayâs integrative vision for what he called personology was to infuse my research for decades.4
Murray became best known for his multiform assessment approach, his weaving of Jungian unconscious themes into the field of personality and for the measurement of needs and corresponding environmental âpressâ in the study of motivation. Although this was fascinating, there was another aspect of his work that intrigued me more. Like Allport, Murray was uncomfortable with the reactive model that the stimulus-response theory of the day espoused. In-stead, he posited that much of our behavior comprises what he called serials, temporally extended enterprises that typically involve acting on a concern, possibly setting it aside and returning to it until it was completed or abandoned. These sets of behavior make sense only through understanding the internally generated aspirations guiding their enactment. He described the nature of these stimulus-free pursuits as proactive.5 Murrayâs concept of serials prompted me to speculate on how we might assess and explore these extended sets of personally salient action. However, that prompt lay dormant for a decade until I wrote my first article on a method for assessing âpersonal projectsâ (Little, 1983). That article began with an explicit acknowledgment of serials as a generative concept that had been essentially uncharted because, unlike many of Murrayâs other constructs, it lacked a compelling assessment instrument through which it could be explored.
Although I first met personology through reading Murray, my later exposure would be more direct, as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley Here, at the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR), the personological tradition was being vigorously extended under the leadership of Donald MacKinnon. This Harvard-Berkeley axis of personology would subsequently play a key role in the development of personal projects research, albeit one that unfolded in a rather peculiar and unexpected series of fortunate events.6
George Kelly and the Partially Prepare d Mind
In a fascinating article, Bandura (1982) examined the role that chance could play in the course of life development and on its relative neglect in psychological theories. He also explicitly discussed its relevance to the trajectory of academic careers, noting that two people, who just happened to sit next to each other at the convention where he first presented this idea, ended up getting married (to each other). The sequence of events leading to the unfolding of the personal projects perspective amply supports the influence of chance and fortuity in scholarly inquiry (see also Campbell, 1981).
At the time I was applying to graduate school I was convinced that neuropsychology was the route for me and I had been lucky enough, as an undergraduate at the University of Victoria in Canada, to be a re-search assistant in one of the first clinical neuropsychology laboratories focused primarily on children. I was attracted by the fun of helping de-sign and build the equipment and calibrate the instruments for neuropsychological assessment and by the elegance of experimentation that the field required. That clinical neuropsychology could contribute to the amelioration of human suffering also mattered a lot. One day I was looking for the Stereotaxic Atlas of the Brain in the college library when I pulled down a misshelved copy of George Kellyâs (1955) Psychology of Personal Constructs. It was a massive two-volume work on human personality. Having been at least partially prompted for âpersonality psychologyâ by reading Murray, I thought I would take a quick skim through Kelly. About 5 hours later and rather stiff from sitting squat-legged on the library floor, I was hooked. Kelly wrote as if he were sitting on the floor alongside me, chatting amicably with a fellow scientist, a stance that happened to reflect exactly Kellyâs core assumption about the everyday people he studied (Bannister, 1966; Kelly, 1955).
Kellyâs writing style was engaging and his content was iconoclastic. He held that most personality, clinical, and motivational theories were based on untenable assumptions. They assumed that people are primarily passive creatures, buffeted about by the vicissitudes of reinforcement or the prodding of unconscious forces. Kelly took a different view, which, although in the spirit of Allport and Murray, was more radical. He saw each person as a lay scientist who erects and tests hypotheses, revises them in the light of experience, and generally engages life in an anticipatory instead of reactive mode. The means through which individuals experience their worlds are personal constructs, essentially conceptual templates or goggles through which people idiosyncratically view the constantly changing contexts of daily life. Even emotional concerns could be addressed through invoking an individualâs personal construct system: Anxiety is becoming aware that an event is outside the range of convenience of oneâs constructs; guilt is awareness of being dislodged from a core role construct; and hostility is the attempt to extort validation for a construct or hypothesis one already suspects has been disconfirmed.
My discovering Kelly as I did was most certainly a chance encounter, albeit one I was moved to pursue by having read Murray. Pasteurâs dictum about chance favoring the prepared mind, or in my case the partially prompted one, continued to ring true, as another serendipitous event soon followed. Norah Carlsen, a faculty member, was looking for a research assistant to help her complete her doctoral dissertation on cognitive complexity as measured by Kellyâs repertory grid technique. This time I was fully Pasteurized. I quickly devoured everything I could on measuring peopleâs personal constructs, established contact with Kelly, began doing nonparametric factor analyses by hand, received copies of his Ohio State studentsâ dissertations, and realized I was becoming a true personal construct theorist. I was also experiencing true cognitive dissonance because, while I was in the process of becoming a committed Kellian, I was busing to Berkeley to study brains.
Berkeley: Persons, Places, and Passion
Just a few days after I arrived at the University of California in 1964, the free speech movement began and a new era of activism was unleashed. It had a subtle and enduring influence on me. The campus radicals were viewed by some faculty (none, so far as I knew, in the Department of Psychology) as merely engaged in Oedipal struggles with the university patriarchy, a view I thought patently absurd. I became even more strongly committed to the solicitous but sophisticated Kellian stance toward explaining human conduct. This approach begins by giving initial credence to individualsâ personal accounts of what they are doing. The eventual course of inquiry may well discover inconsistencies, distortions, and self-delusion, but attempts to directly solicit accounts of why students did not want to be âfolded, mutilated, or bentâ like mistreated computer cards seemed more constructive than dismissing their dissent as the mere eruption of primitive unconscious processes. Once again, just as with the reaction to Snowâs two cultures argument, I realized that academic institutions and human personalities could collide with in-credible force. Along with the political ferment, there was a confluence of intellectual forces that shaped the personal projects perspective in ways that, I realize in retrospect, were pivotal. Despite a lingering affinity for neuropsychology, and pa...