This book reminds me of a tired
joke:  A psychiatrist interviewing a prospective patient shows him a picture of
a triangle and asks, "What does that make you think of?"  The patient
says "Sex!"  When the same response to a square and circle elicits
the diagnosis, "You are obsessed with sex," the patient replies, "Doc,
you’re the one showing the dirty pictures!"

In the present book, the "dirty
pictures" are the facts of Gordon Allport’s career as an academic
psychologist; the "sex" is the author’s insistence on "constructing"
these facts as proof of how everything in psychology is "gendered."  Here
is the work of a social constructivist who, mistaking a history of
psychologists for a history of psychology, regards ideas as nothing but symptoms
of the larger culture, the most important feature of which is its evaluation of
women.  Thus, the author, a professor of the history and theory of psychology
at York University in Canada, tries manfully to show how Gordon Allport’s
career as "the patron saint of personality" was the work of a Mama’s
boy grown into a sensitive man.  This man, we are told without cease, devoted
himself to softening the "masculine," (i.e., positivist and
experimental) psychology that prevailed at Harvard, where he spent most of his
career, with a dollop of the "feminine" (i.e., introspective or phenomenological)
psychology to which he was exposed in Germany the year after he took his
doctorate. 

The trouble is that the facts cited
do not support the construction so determinedly put on them. Grant that Gordon
Allport was a somewhat sissified and aesthetically sensitive boy as compared to
his football playing brothers, who included the distinguished psychologist
Floyd Allport.  Grant, too, that Gordon would have liked to add a subjective
study of the person to the objective studies that he conducted.  When all is
said and done, the fact remains:  He did not.  Though Allport sometimes paid
lip service to "humanistic" psychology, his use of questionnaires to
measure traits of personality studiously adhered to the positivist standards
that prevailed at the time. (The only trouble was that the tests were never
validated.) Allport would not have been as widely admired and celebrated as he was
if he had done otherwise.

Our author might have had better
luck making a case if he had focused more exclusively on the thesis suggested
by his title–viz., that, despite its widespread if temporary acceptance, the concept
of personality never had much basis in reality.  It was a creation of psychologists
in the thrall of nineteenth century German transcendentalism.  (More specifically,
it was a version of Kant’s transcendental ego of pure apperception and will.) 
Although it had a successful run during the middle half of the 20th century, the
concept no longer has much cachet, and it has not had much for a quarter of a century.
As our author points out, the hope was that personality tests could serve the
needs of a commercial society by providing a scientific replacement for the
moral concept of character.  Like IQ tests, which measure intellectual ability,
personality inventories would pick out traits of interest to employers, welfare
workers, policemen, clinicians, etc. Unfortunately, the program did not quite fulfill
the hopes for it–proof that the guiding concept was ill founded.

Why doesn’t our author emphasize
this point?   I can only guess.  The fact that the concept of personality has
little correspondence to reality does not comport well with a belief that
absolutely all concepts, including those which are empirically validated, are "social
constructions" lacking basis in reality.  That our author believes this
may explain his failure to see confusion in the assumption that, since women
can’t do "masculine" science, they may do "feminine"
science instead. The trouble with this suggestion is that "masculine
science"–i.e., the objective, experimental and analytical study of
reality –is, tautologically, all the science there is. "Feminine science"–i.e.,
subjective and intuitive speculation about unrealities–is simply an oxymoron.

Despite the flaws in its
conceptualization, this book will provide patient readers with some facts about
its subject’s life and field of work.  I say "patient readers"
because the work is somewhat longwinded.  In 225 pages it covers only the first
half of Allport’s career, and a hundred pages have gone by before the author
has gotten Allport out of graduate school.  A reader with more "feminine"
interests and tastes might find the commonplace details enchanting, but I won’t
wait for the next installment.

© 2004 Max Hocutt

Max Hocutt Ph.D., Emeritus
Professor of Philosophy, The University of Alabama; author of Grounded
Ethics: The Empirical Bases of Normative Judgment; formerly editor of Behavior
and Philosophy.

Categories: Psychology