Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood

Canadian Psychology, May 2004 by Gifford, Robert

IAN A. M. NICHOLSON Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003, 288 pages (ISBN 1-55798-929-X, US$39.95 Hardcover)

Reviewed by ROBERT GIFFORD

Gordon Allport was not what he appeared. Of course, to me as a graduate student who was required to read his classic handbook chapter on the history of social psychology, he merely appeared as an eminence grise from the past, without body or soul. Ian A. M. Nicholson's masterful new half-biography (the book, unfortunately, covers only the first half of Allport's career, to 1938) certainly fills in the complexity of Allport's soul. Of his body, I am less sure.

For someone who later achieved the justifiable status as the person who was most responsible for legitimizing the scientific study of personality, Allport's early life was filled with unusual self-doubt. As a child, he felt feminine and weak compared to his muscular older brothers, including Floyd, who of course attained stature as a leading psychologist himself. The four Allport brothers were raised by a strong-willed physician and his missionary-oriented wife in small-town Ohio.

From an early age, Gordon rejected "boy culture" in favour of softer pursuits. As a young man, he had such close relationships with other men, including "bare bodies churning the limpid waters" during starlight swims, "lusty" singing, and rowing in "beautiful, secluded spots," that a modern observer would certainly wonder about his sexual orientation. Nicholson concludes that Allport was engaging in "manly love" typical of the time, in which very close relations between men remained asexual.

The tender side of Allport was relevant to his career and accomplishments. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that Allport's devotion to personality as a research topic was, at that time, the sublimation of his tender personality in the face of the tough experimentalism trumpeted in the United States at that time by Floyd Allport and many others. Voyages of academic and personal discovery to Germany, then the important but declining centre of psychology, were both inspiring and horrifying: Allport encountered closed ranks of stiff authoritarian men in heavy dark suits, conspicuously flicking their de rigriew cigars, yet was entranced by their advocacy of a much more holistic approach to psychology.

The great added value of Nicholson's book is that it is not a mere biography of Allport, but an ambitious foray into the zeigtgeist of psychology in the early part of the last century. Whether they were for (Americans) or against (Germans) the "psychology of elements," the virtually all-male coteries struggled to make psychology respectable. In the process, they (if you will) masculated psychology.

Nicholson paints a full-colour canvas of the most important figures of the day, such as William Stern and Eduard Spranger, advocates of a view of psychology that emphasized a larger, more holistic vision that included "the unity of personality, purpose and Kultur," and believed that the study of basic psychological elements was nothing more than "a small and relatively insignificant corner of the domain." One wonders what Stern, Spranger, and - as someone strongly influenced by them - Allport himself, would think about the near-hegemonic position of cognitive psychology today, the successor to the old "psychology of elements." But in those days, German psychology had such prestige that North American students had a "fetish" about it, according to David Leary, the historian, because training in Germany could confer an important status in the North American job market of the day.

Domestically, Allport and his wife Ada experienced the seemingly eternal conflict between homework and profession for the wife. To his credit, Allport repeatedly told his wife that he supported her professional efforts as a talented and intelligent social worker. But both he and she shrank, in the stink of reality, to traditional sex roles, so that Gordon could prosper.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Allport's life, at least to me, was his strong religosity and antimodernist sentiments. According to Nicholson, Allport was fascinated, with "an almost sexual intensity," by ritual and sacrament. he once wrote, "Don't you long for this...olde [.or] English worship...17th century organ notes, 14th century choir stalls, and flickering alter candles which have been in place since...1133?" This illustrates the paradox and complexity of his soul: These antimodernist sentiments vying for energy within a man who was trying to push the most modern of psychological trends (at that time), the study of personality.

This conflict, between his intellectual appreciation of scientific, elemental, empiricist rigour and his love of some imagined glorious lost golden era in which the whole person was to be understood in the full context of culture, purpose, and meaning, plagued Allport. The title of a paper he wrote in 1938 says almost all: "Personality: A problem for science or art?" Nevertheless, throughout the first part of his career, at least, Allport was able to balance the two impulses in a way that pleased most colleagues and in ways that propelled him from a Harvard undergraduate education back, via a short stint at Dartmouth, to a full professorial career at Harvard. That was his secret of success: Many would have been paralyzed by the conflict; Allport found a way to exploit the value in each perspective.