Humanism in Personology

Allport, Maslow, and Murray

Paul Costa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351514231
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Through analysis of the lives and theories of the three major exponents of humanism, Allport, Maslow, and Murray, the authors have marshaled some compelling arguments for an alternative to the extreme behaviorism of Skinner and the logical positivism of Freud. This work is a concise, clear synthesis of both broad theoretical positions and specifi c concepts that underlie humanistic psychology.

1

General Orientations Toward the Nature of Personality

Hall and Lindzey (1957, p. 4) observe that personality theorists have been rebels in their time, and to judge from the dissatisfaction of Allport, Murray, and Maslow with the orthodoxies of the last few decades, they are not exceptions to this generalization. Faithful rendition of the bases for the considerable impact these psychologists have had requires attention not only to their positively and consistently affirmed assumptions about the nature of man, but also to their enriching critical remarks, so often leveled against radical behaviorism and classical Freudianism.

Man is Proactive

Perhaps the most basic of the convictions shared by Allport, Maslow, and Murray is that man has internal processes and structures that have a causal influence upon perception, thought, feeling and action. Some of these internal characteristics, such as the instincts (Murray and Kluckhohn, 1956, pp. 23–24) and needs (Maslow, 1954, pp. 107–55) are endogenous; others, such as individual styles of life (Allport, 1961, pp. 266–67; Murray, 1959, pp. 32–33; Maslow, 1954, pp. 300–302), are learned. All three theorists feel that it is impossible to provide an adequate explanation of a person’s functioning in any given situation solely by consideration of the external features of the stimulus situation. Hence, any approach that focuses exclusively, or even predominantly, upon external factors is a target for criticism. These approaches, “associationism of all types, including environmentalism, behaviorism, stimulus-response … psychology” (Allport, 1955, p. 8) , have been pejoratively labeled “Lockean” by Allport, “Peripheralistic” by Murray (1938, pp. 5–11) , and atomistic-reductionistic by Maslow (1954, p. 27) . Among the assumed errors made by adherents to these views are a disregard of extensive observational, logical, and introspective evidence for proaction (Allport, 1961, pp. 24–28; Murray, 1959, p. 15; Maslow, 1954, pp. 22–26) and a treatment of personality as no more than a logically superfluous concept (Allport, 1961, p. 27) . The three personologists could very well point to the extensive literature on individual and group differences in functioning under objectively similar stimulus conditions to bolster their position.

Although Allport, Maslow, and Murray have steadfastly given primary causal importance to internal characteristics, they have not overlooked the role of external factors. None of them sees much value in the behavioristic type of situational analysis, however, because it tends to oversimplify the subtlety and complexity of human interaction with the environment, and restricts the range of stimulus meaning considered. They feel more satisfied with cultural and sociological variables, such as peer group and role pressures.

Only Murray has given external determinants the most prominent place in his thinking. Recent elaborations of the positions of Allport, Maslow, and Murray still show this difference, although all three seem to be giving more weight than formerly to exogenous factors. Murray writes that under the long influence of such colleagues as Kluckhohn, he has “… come to think that no theoretical system constructed on the psychological level will be adequate until it has been embraced by and intermeshed with a cultural-sociological system” (Murray, 1959, p. 45). Murray has not abandoned primary emphasis on proactive, individual personality factors, nor has he embraced the extreme interactional position exemplified by Sullivan (Murray, 1959, pp. 30–31), but external determinants are given considerable importance. In contrast, Allport’s (1961, pp. 165–95) endorsement of such determinants remained to the end tentative and qualified. He took pains to delimit the province of strong external instigation of functioning to those situations that are highly structured (ibid., pp. 178–79). And Maslow (1954, p. 75) was even less willing to accept situational determinism.

Allport, Maslow, and Murray also differ in their perceptions of the typical nature of the interaction between proactive and external forces. Murray (1959, pp. 45–56) emphasizes the almost continual conflict produced by the antagonism between the two sets of forces, while Allport (1961, p. 186) believed that external factors usually function to set rather wide limits on the range of behavioral possibilities available to the person, still leaving considerable latitude for proactive tendencies to be expressed without severe conflict. Although Maslow has been less explicit than the other two, he seemed more in agreement with Allport than Murray, except for psychopathological cases, where he moves closer to the latter theorist.

Man Possesses Psychological Organization

In man’s proactive functioning, Allport, Maslow, and Murray find regularity and order to be typical, and attribute this to the unified, organized nature of personality. Allport (1961, pp. 376–91) found that the individual’s behavior shows complex integration. Murray feels that “personality is a temporal whole and to understand a part of it one must have a sense, though vague, of the totality” (Murray, 1938, p. 4). He argues by analogy that the unending transaction of biochemical processes in the brain, the obvious bodily locus of personality, makes it unlikely that any but a holistic view is tenable. Maslow (1954, Chapter 3) was actually the strongest proponent of the three theorists for the holistic position, arguing that it is impossible to appreciate any one aspect of a person’s behavior without reference to all other aspects as well. For Maslow, each aspect of personality actually fuses with, and therefore changes, each other aspect, making it unfruitful to do otherwise than speak in terms of complex wholes.

Allport, Maslow, and Murray recognize two aspects of psychological organization. The first is unity at a given moment, seen in the convergence of many personality characteristics in the determination of functioning (Allport, 1961, p. 377; Murray, 1938, p. 86; Maslow, 1954, p. 63). The second is unity over a longer period of time. In discussing this, these theorists maintain that at the beginning of life the infant responds as a whole (Allport, 1961, p. 377; Murray, 1938, pp. 38–39; Maslow, 1962, pp. 177–82). As he becomes older, the primitive unity gives way to a more sophisticated psychological integration of the various components of personality, differentiated from the earlier whole by learning (Allport, 1961, p. 377; Murray, 1938, pp. 38–39, 395–96). Integration is maintained through the development of more general, embracing characteristics as the process of differentiation leads to greater complexity (Allport, 1961, p. 377). Important in the organizational aspect of the psychological growth is the time-binding quality of cognitive processes (Murray, 1938, p. 49).

From the three theorists’ view of psychological organization, associationistic positions and limited experimental approaches seem particularly inadequate.

I was slow to perceive that current psychological theories of behavior were almost wholly concerned with actions of relatively short duration, reflexes and consecutive instrumental acts which reach their terminus within one experimental session, rather than with long-range enterprises which take weeks, months, or years of effort to complete… . The behavior of animals can be explained largely by reference to attractive or repellent presentations in their immediate environment and/or to momentarily urgent and rather quickly reducible states of tension; whereas a great deal of man’s behavior cannot be explained except by reference to persistent “self-stimulation” in accordance with a plan of action, which often involves the subject’s commitment to a distal goal or set of goals, as well as to a more or less flexible (or rigid) temporal order (schedule) or subsidiary, or stage, goals. (Murray, 1959, p. 23)

Allport (1961, pp. 258–59) agreed with Murray, and expressed his opposition to most existing analytical approaches to personality.¹ He felt the approaches tended to slice personality in fictitious ways in an attempt to achieve simplification and understanding. Maslow (1966, 1968a) could not have agreed more, taking the position that the theorists recommend methods of study that involve as much as possible of the individual’s functioning at one moment in time and over the course of time, and that they attempt to represent the interrelated nature of aspects of functioning, however difficult this may be.

For all their objection to narrow, particularistic approaches, both Murray and Allport recognize the importance of avoiding the seductive pitfall of holistic approaches, namely, that they encourage “those lazy white elephants of the mind—huge, catchall, global concepts signifying nothing” (Murray, 1959, p. 19). Murray hurls a challenge at exponents of this extreme that is fully as biting as that leveled at the opposite extremists:

The terms “personality-as-a-whole” and “personality system” have been very popular in recent years; but no writer, so far as I know, has explicitly defined the components of a “whole” personality or of a “system of personality.” When definitions of the units of a system are lacking, the term stands for no more than an article of faith, and is misleading to boot, in so far as it suggests a condition of affairs that may not actually exist. (Murray, 1959, p. 51)

Earlier, probably due to the demands of wartime conditions, Murray, who was working with the OSS staff, found it advisable or desirable to present a conception of the “personality as a whole” in contrast to a construct of the “whole personality.” Starting with the acknowledgment that various people were using “whole personality” in reference to the total or entire personality, Murray distinguished two possible bases for the phrase: the whole longitudinal, or temporal, personality, and the whole cross-sectional personality.

Murray describes the whole longitudinal personality as being relatively concrete, referring to the entire sequence of organized psychological processes in the brain from birth to death. The cross-sectional personality, on the other hand, is very abstract and hypothetical: Personality is the entire constitution of potential psychological processes and structures in the brain at a given moment. Murray entertained the notion of combining these two definitions of the “whole” personality concept “into an all-inclusive notion which embraces not only the history of the proceedings of personality (longitudinal view), but the history of its developing establishment as portrayed by a series of cross-sectional formulations” (Murray, 1948, p. 45) .

Considering a complete formulation of the development of the concept of the “whole personality” both impossible and undesirable, Murray proposed that several different formulations of the “personality as a v, hole” are sufficient for designated purposes, such as assessment or psychotherapy. Thus, it is not the whole, entire personality but the “personality as a whole”—"the over-all unity and organization of parts that is attained during a designated period of the subject’s life. It refers to the degree of unity and coordination (wholeness) that the personality exhibits during one short functional operation, or in a long series of progressions, day after day, toward a distribution gradient, or in the establishment, over a life-time, of a harmonious way of life which allows for the successive satisfaction of its major needs” (Murray, 1948, p. 46) .

A similar note is struck by Allport (1955, pp. 36–41), who considered it unwise to adopt an unelaborated, undetailed form of the concept of self because doing so would perpetuate the aura of mystery and the supernatural attending an unfathomable soul. Maslow was essentially mute on this matter of holistic vagueness, and, as will be apparent later, was actually less careful to avoid it in his formal theorizing than were the other two.

As indicated by some of the previous quotations and other statements, Allport (1961, p. 380) and Murray (1951a, pp. 19–21) have attempted to avoid holistic vagueness by focusing primarily upon the organizational characteristics of the personality involving purposiveness. But little organization is produced by the easily satisfied, and therefore relatively transitory, viscerogenic drives. Organization is primarily a function of those endogenous and learned purposes, such as life goals (Allport, 1955, p. 49), dispositions to create (Murray, 1959, pp. 38–45), and competence motivation (White, 1959), that are nonspecific as to the particulars of goal states and hence relatively insatiable and continuing. Secondary in importance for unity are the less clearly purposive, more expressive styles of functioning (Allport, 1961, pp. 460–94)importance for unity are the less clearly purposive, more expressive styles of functioning (Allport, 1961, pp.). Maslow (1954, pp. 179–86) certainly took the same route, but was generally more content with unrefined versions of his concepts than the other two theorists.

Man is Psychologically Complex

By emphasizing organization, Allport, Maslow, and Murray do not mean to imply that man’s functioning is simple. This functioning is staggeringly complex if one focuses upon the many different elements that develop through the process of differentiation. Indeed, in order to delineate the organization, it is necessary to observe the abstract or general features of functioning that can be grouped together into classes on the basis of equivalence of purpose or meaning. Considerable inference is involved in such observation.

Our three theorists are aware that the level of abstraction one chooses in analysing behavior will determine how complex that behavior appears. The important matter is to find the level of abstraction that does least violence to the vital qualities of human living. It is known for example that a quite concrete, relatively uninterpretive analysis stressing the physical characteristics of behavior would lead to a view of that behavior as very complex due to its great variability among and within individuals (Fiske, 1961). However useful such an approach is for some purposes, Allport, Murray, and Maslow would find it employing too low a level of abstraction to do justice to the psychological meaning of functioning.

Allport and Murray have also expressed dissatisfaction with the opposite extreme level of abstraction, exemplified by theories that rely rather exclusively upon concepts involving a very high level of abstraction and interpretation. Such theories typically make only a few discriminations, thus missing some of the important differences between aspects of functioning This is the primary difficulty that led Allport to make the critical statement that Freud’s “general picture of motivation makes personality almost a wholly reactive product of two archaic forces…. Of course we gladly grant that adult motives often reflect sex and aggression … yet we cannot believe that Freud does justice to the diversity, uniqueness, and contemporaneity of most adult motivation” (Allport, 1961, p. 208) . Similarly, Murray finds that his chief objection to Freud’s system “is the commonplace that … the libido has digested all the needs contributing to self-preservation, self-regard, and self-advancement, together with a host of others, and rebaptized them in the name of Sex” (Murray, 1959, pp. 37–38).

Allport and Murray favor the utilization of a moderate level of observational abstraction, along with the higher level that permits an understanding of organization, because they are convinced that people have many different, changing, and sometimes incompatible intentions, values, and styles that can be expressed in different ways depending upon the environmental context. They believe that an adequate theory of personality should permit an explanation of these complexities. This view makes Allport and Murray critical of oversimplified explanations (Allport, 1961, pp. 208–211; Murray, 1954, pp. 442–45; 1959, pp. 37–38, 43). Oversimplification has occurred when the personality constructs used (1) focus too exclusively upon the concrete physical characteristics of responses, predicting that a high level of consistency will be found, (2) are so abstract and few in number that psychologically useful distinctions are blurred, (3) are too rudimentary, having been developed to account for animal behavior, to yield adequate explanations at the human level with its great range of behavioral potential and time-binding features, and (4) are not employed within a system permitting an understanding of changes in patterns of functioning over time.

Although Maslow agrees with the emphasis in the last paragraph, he tended to work at a much more global, undifferentiated level of abstraction than the other two personolo-gists. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Allport’s and Murray’s criticisms of the Freudian penchant for overgeneralization apply to Maslow as well. In his defense, Maslow might have asked how one is ever to understand such holistic phenomena as love by references to single aspects of personality (Maslow, 1962, 1967b) .

Man’s Functioning is Rational

With the exception of some recent developments within ego-psychology, Freudian theory has emphasized the view that man’s behavior originates in, and is determined largely by, unconscious, inexorable, selfish, primitive impulses. It is true that Freud conceived of the ego as a realistic and therefore rational agent, but it was given a reactive role in determining functioning. According to this extreme view, whatever rationality man seems to express in thought processes involving planning, decision making and achieving intellectual understanding is in large measure a defensive use of cognition in order to conceal the underlying irrational impulses that are the basic determinants of functioning

To Allport (1961, pp. 145–54), Freud’s view of man seemed almost wholly wrong. Allport believed that the adult’s functioning is characteristically rational, being governed by such conscious characteristics of personality as long-range goals, plans of action, and philosophies of life. The extreme Freudian position that Allport reacted against would not dispute that such phenomena exist, but these phenomena would not be considered independent, primary determinants of functioning. Allport’s view of adult functioning would more likely be considered a justification after the fact of compelling action of the Id. In contrast, Allport believed that only children, who have yet to develop their personality fully, and the mentally ill, in whom the maturation of rational processes has been arrested or disrupted, come close to fitting the image of extreme Freudianism.

The positions of Murray (1938, pp. 46–47, 49–54) and Maslow (1954, pp. 205–28) on functioning, though less opposed to the classical Freudian view, are similar to that of Allport in that they invest man with a large measure of rationality. Rational and irrational processes are considered to exist together in the perso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. General Orientations Toward the Nature of Personality
• 2. The Formal Theories: Relatively Concrete Concepts
• 3. The Formal Theories: Relatively General Concepts
• 4. Development of Ideal and Nonideal Personalities
• 5. Representative Research
• 6. The Men Behind the Theories
• 7. Conclusions
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Names Index
• Subject Index