Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews
Print ISSN: 0010-7549
Published by: American Psychological Association
Publisher Location: US

DOI: 10.1037/006196
Copyright year: 1960
Copyright holder: American Psychological Association
Volume: 5, Issue: 11, Nov 1960, pages 353-355
Print pub-date: November 1960
Holistic personality
ARTHUR R. JENSEN
The reviewer identifies the authors in his review. Dr. Jensen himself 
is Research Associate in the Institute of Personality Assessment and 
Research at the University of California in Berkeley and also 
Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology. It was Percival 
Symonds at Teachers College, Columbia, whose assistant Jensen was for 
three years, who interested him in the subject of personality. 
Symonds and Jensen have written a book together on the development of 
personality, a volume that the Columbia University Press should 
publish shortly. Between his PhD and his going to Berkeley, Jensen 
had two years with Eysenck in the Maudsley Laboratory in London. 
While there he wrote the 1958 chapter on Personality in the Annual 
Review of Psychology.
Product: 1962-01013-000. Toward Understanding Human Personalities 
Robert Ward Leeper and Peter Madison New York: 
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959. Pp. xvi + 439. $5.50.
History: PsycINFO ReleaseDate: 23-10-2006; PsycCRITIQUES ReleaseDate: 
23-10-2006; PsycINFO CorrectionDate: 21-08-2017; PsycCRITIQUES 
CorrectionDate: 21-08-2017

Abstract
Reviews the book, _Toward Understanding Human Personalities_ by 
Robert Ward Leeper and Peter Madison (see record 1962-01013-000). 
This book does not present a new theory of personality nor is it 
theoretical in any systematic sense. What the authors have attempted 
and have done admirably well, is to spread before the reader a vast 
array of real-life phenomena that are the raw materials of 
personality research. In their effort to present a panoramic view of 
the domain of personality, the authors have drawn upon innumerable, 
personal anecdotes, case histories, records of psychotherapy, student 
autobiographies, descriptive anthropology, and works of fiction. This 
book does not suggest that personality can be treated as a natural 
science amenable to rigorous research. It contains however hardly any 
mention of biological and hereditary aspects of personality, or of 
the great amount of work that has already been done in the 
measurement and assessment of personality, or of the statistical and 
experimental methods that might advance our knowledge of personality. 
(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)

Keywords: personalities; research; case histories; psychotherapy; 
student autobiographies; anthropology

This book is the fruit of almost a lifetime of thinking about 
personality. Though Robert Leeper, Chairman of the Department of 
Psychology at the University of Oregon, is best known for his work in 
the fields of learning and cognition and for his critiques of Clark 
Hull and Kurt Lewin, he tells us in the Preface that his major 
interest has always been in personality. He began thinking about this 
book as an undergraduate in the 1920s and began writing it in 1937. 
He has worked on it steadily for twenty-two years. In the last five 
years he had as collaborator one of his former students, Peter 
Madison, a Harvard PhD in clinical psychology, now at Swarthmore 
College. The book is a complete amalgam of their joint efforts.

The field of personality today is hardly a science in the sense of 
being in possession of a body of verified laws and theories. It can 
be called a scientific field only inasmuch as we may regard its 
subject matter as a realm of natural phenomena which may be subjected 
to the usual methods of science, that is to say, to systematic 
description, classification, measurement, analysis, the discovery of 
functional relationships, and the eventual comprehension of these 
relationships or laws under a general model or theory.

Headway is made in this endeavor by scrupulous attention to parsimony 
and precision in the use of language, to operational definition and, 
in the early stages at least, to simplification and abstraction. All 
this must proceed in close proximity to empirical realities, to 
controlled observation and experimentation. The signs of progress in 
our understanding of personality are becoming apparent, not so much 
as yet in the form of substantive knowledge about personality as in 
the development of methods for studying personality scientifically. 
Progress is being made, though we are still just at the beginning of 
a science of personality and still have far to go even in the 
development of our tools of investigation. But this is the direction 
we must follow if we are to understand personality in the sense 
referred to as Wissenschaft, that is, in the objective, analytical, 
nomothetic sense.

In contrast to Wissenschaft is another kind of understanding called 
Verstehen, an intuitive, holistic, empathic, appreciative way of 
viewing and interpreting phenomena in terms of one's own feeling 
states. It is more in this tradition of Verstehen rather than 
Wissenschaft that Leeper and Madison speak of "understanding human 
personalities." Both the strengths and weaknesses of their work are 
largely a result of this holistic, idiographic, Verstehen-type 
approach.

In dedicating the book to Kohler and Tolman, the authors acknowledge 
their indebtedness to the gestalt-field theory. They have written the 
first introductory textbook in the personality field having a 
field-theoretical orientation. (Gardner Murphy's Personality may come 
to mind, but it is far more eclectic.) The authors have been 
influenced also by psychologists such as Adler, Rank, Horney, 
Sullivan, Carl Rogers, and George Kelly. They also owe much to Freud, 
but they disapprove of the `narrowness' of orthodox psychoanalytic 
theory, with its emphasis on biological drives and the `negative' 
aspects of personality.

THE book does not present a new theory of personality nor is it 
theoretical in any systematic sense. What the authors have attempted 
and have done admirably well - some might say they have done it too 
well - is to spread before the reader a vast array of real-life 
phenomena that are the raw materials of personality research. Much of 
the book, perhaps half of it, is taken up with colorful, rich, 
realistically detailed descriptions of various human experiences. In 
their effort to present a panoramic view of the domain of 
personality, the authors have drawn upon innumerable, personal 
anecdotes, case histories, records of psychotherapy, student 
autobiographies, descriptive anthropology, and works of fiction, in 
one instance quoting a passage of 10,000 words from a novel by 
Lillian Smith. On the other hand, we hear nothing at all about such 
`colorless' things as measurements, questionnaires, inventories, test 
scores, correlations, types, traits, factors, or dimensions.

Rather than working toward a science of personality, the authors have 
merely developed a manner of speaking about personality. It is a 
manner that will be easy for the layman to grasp in this day when 
Freud and the unconscious are household terms. The book translates 
into the language of `dynamic' and gestalt psychology what are still 
essentially the layman's ways of thinking about human behavior.

The idea most insistently and pervasively expressed throughout the 
book is that personality is like an iceberg, with most of its mass 
submerged from view. The most important part of personality is what 
lies below the surface. Behavior itself is interesting only in that 
it provides clues as to what is going on underneath the behavior, or 
behind it, or inside the person somewhere. This underlying something, 
whatever it may be, is not conceived of in physiological terms nor is 
it linked in any clear or operational way to observable behavior or 
to events in the environment. The underlying "mechanisms," 
"processes," "dynamic organizations," and the like are simply a 
redundant manner of speaking about behavior. For example, the authors 
explain that a person tires of a particular activity because of 
"satiation effects," and "satiation effects" are in evidence when a 
person tires of a particular activity. Obviously nothing of an 
explanatory nature is achieved by the use of the term satiation 
effects.

"Perceptual processes" carry the greatest burden of explanation. The 
dogs in the Solomon and Wynne experiment are said to go on avoiding 
the electric-shock box even when there is no longer any shock because 
there is no change in their perception of the situation. When the 
dogs cease jumping, it is because of a change in their perception. 
The behavioristic, anxiety-reduction interpretations of Solomon and 
Wynne, Dollard and Miller, and Mowrer are not hinted at. Yet the 
question is not even raised concerning how the perceptual change 
comes about.

The authors do not regard all individual differences in human 
behavior as personality. Personality refers only to "emotionally 
significant processes." It is how the person perceives and deals with 
things of emotional significance to him. Personality is largely 
learned (learning consists of a change in perception); it is also a 
resultant of the reintegration of past experiences brought about by 
the forces of the immediate psychological field.

THE critical reader is apt to become confused by the lack of 
definitional clarity in the authors' manner of speaking about 
personality. Often the key words outnumber the actual concepts to 
which they refer - for example, processes and mechanisms, conflict 
and disunity. We read that "personality processes are perceptual 
processes." Also "perceptual processes may be motivational 
processes." "Emotions are motives" and "emotional processes are 
perceptual processes." These "processes" are never anchored in any 
way to observables. The closest the authors ever come to doing so is 
to state that "the development of emotional motives ... results from 
the formation and growth of neural systems that the individual 
originally did not possess" (p. 217). Many of the explanations by 
analogy are more puzzling than clarifying. ("Perceptual processes can 
be motivational processes at the same time they are perceptual 
processes, just as it is true that a person is living in Pennsylvania 
at the same time he is living in Philadelphia;" "The world topples 
into war because it resembles a pyramid standing on its point instead 
of on its base.")

Another manner of thinking about behavior that the book inculcates, 
perhaps inadvertently through the loose use of language, is the 
notion that we "use" habits, we "use" motives, emotions, 
"reintegrative mechanisms," and so on, as if we possessed a store of 
mechanisms or processes within us that we could call upon in various 
circumstances.

For what audience is the book intended? This question arouses my most 
serious concern. The authors have expressly addressed themselves 
primarily to the psychology undergraduate taking his first course in 
personality. Certainly the book will be easy and interesting for this 
audience. The style is smooth and very readable. The approach is 
appropriately didactic for the undergraduate; in every chapter the 
authors adhere to the rule of first telling the reader what they are 
going to say, then saying it, and then telling the reader what they 
have said. Consequently, more advanced students may feel that the 
book is longer than necessary for its essential contents.

My concern is that I greatly doubt that this book will attract into 
psychology or into the area of personality those students who have a 
scientific bent. Yet it is they who are the future hope of 
psychology. This book does not suggest that personality can be 
treated as a natural science amenable to rigorous research. Actually, 
for an introductory text in a field at this stage in its development, 
the text is probably not sufficiently eclectic. It contains hardly 
any mention of biological and hereditary aspects of personality, or 
of the great amount of work that has already been done in the 
measurement and assessment of personality, or of the statistical and 
experimental methods that might advance our knowledge of personality. 
In this respect the exposition stands in marked contrast to the texts 
of, say, Cattell and Guilford. The names of such outstanding 
researchers in personality as Cattell and Eysenck are not even 
mentioned, and Guilford's name appears only in the bibliography. 
Indeed, the authors eschew any mention of factor-analytic or 
behavioristic research in personality. Occasionally they even make 
slighting remarks about experimentation and laboratory investigation 
as being "colorless and neutral."

On the other hand, this is a book that the researcher in personality 
may well afford to read, if only to be reminded of the richness and 
complexity of his domain. Still we know that if we are to make any 
real progress in a science of personality, we must be content with a 
degree of simplicity that permits functional analysis, even though we 
must seek it in the laboratory. However one may disapprove the 
authors' depreciation of this point of view, they must nevertheless 
be commended for achieving their unique purpose of presenting 
personality in a richly human perspective.