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Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences: Vol. 33(4), 405 – 419 Fall 1997
© 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0022-5061/97/040405-15

“IDIOGRAPHIC” VIS-À-VIS “IDIODYNAMIC” IN THE

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE OF PERSONALITY THEORY:
REMEMBERING GORDON ALLPORT, 1897 – 1997
SAUL ROSENZWEIG AND SHERRI L. FISHER

The centenary of Gordon W. Allport provides an occasion for reappraising his special po-
sition regarding uniqueness in personality. Allport’s theory of personality, as first pre-
sented in his 1937 textbook, highlighted the idiographic in conjunction with the
nomothetic approach, and the fundamental unit in his formulation was the trait. He de-
scribed common and unique traits as well as the unique organization of traits. In con-
tradistinction, the idiodynamic orientation, introduced by Saul Rosenzweig in 1951 and,
in more detail in 1958, focused on events which over a lifespan constitute an idioverse —
a population of phenomenological events. Allport’s original emphasis on the idiographic
and his later confusion concerning idiodynamics, can, in considerable measure, be under-
stood by recognizing the role of religious spirituality in his conception of the person. That
conception, which derived from an early religious indoctrination, asserted itself with re-
newed vigor in his later years. His scientific conception of personality thus remained un-
consummated, subordinated by him to the unsolvable mysteries of ontology which
properly belong, he believed, in the domain of faith. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The year 1997 marks a centenary for Gordon W. Allport, who was born in 1897. An oc-
casion for a reappraisal of his unique emphasis upon the uniqueness of the individual per-
sonality is thus provided. The idiographic approach to the study of personality, introduced by
Allport in 1937, has gained many more adherents since his death in 1967. His popularity has
accordingly been rekindled.1 It has now been rather widely recognized that the principles of
general psychology prevalent in the first quarter of the century were not sufficient for the un-
derstanding of the uniqueness of the individual.2 But in this recognition there remains a lack
of clarity concerning Allport’s conception of the idiographic. In the present reappraisal, a
distinction will be drawn between the idiographic and the cognate idiodynamic approach
that may provide a helpful clarification pointing beyond the idiographic. And by tracing
some of the roots of Allport’s orientation, his place in the history of psychological theory
will become precise and understandable.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND FOR GORDON ALLPORT’S DEBUT

In modern scientific psychology three pioneer movements took place in the latter part of
the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century. In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt established
the first laboratory of experimental (physiological) psychology, at the University of Leipzig.3
That laboratory was devoted to the exploration of general principles governing human behavior,

SAUL ROSENZWEIG is Professor Emeritus, Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, Washington

University, St. Louis, MO. His recent book, Freud, Jung and Hall the King-maker: The Historic Expedi-
tion to America, marks the culmination of a long career devoted to personality theory and the history of
psychology. During his graduate training at Harvard in the 1930’s he had repeated contacts with Pro-
fessor Gordon W. Allport in a relationship that continued until Allport’s death in 1967.
SHERRI L. FISHER is an advanced graduate student in social psychology at St. Louis University and,
currently, a pre-doctoral fellow in psychology working under the supervision of Saul Rosenzweig.

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406 SAUL ROSENZWEIG AND SHERRI L. FISHER

achieved with a few experimentees who supposedly represented the average of the human
species. The observations were often a matter of introspective report.4 It was recognized that
these general principles required the qualification of residual individual differences.
At about the same time, Francis Galton in England was engaged in a study of individual
differences as such, in a program that later acquired the name “differential psychology.”5 The
individual, measured for certain functions or capacities, such as reaction time, found a place
in an array of such measurements for the group under study. Such groups had demographi-
cally defined parameters, e.g., male or female, a given age range, etc. In this way individual
differences became the subject matter of a differential psychology about the observed range,
mean, and degree of variation into which the individual could be fitted.
A third pioneer approach was developed under Sigmund Freud in Vienna at the turn of
the century — 1894 – 1910 — in which the psychodynamics of a neurotic patient was under
treatment for disturbing symptoms. In this process the patient was interviewed by the physi-
cian and provided free associations for analysis.6 From these data, the therapist was able to
derive interpretations based on the prior life experience of the patient. By making and reveal-
ing these interpretations to the patient, improvement in the patient’s symptoms often oc-
curred. Emphasis here was not on variations in abilities, such as those measured by Galton,
or on the general principles explored by Wundt, but on the motivational or dynamic con-
flicts, largely sexual, that appeared to have had a crucial part in creating the symptoms or
complaints. Freud developed general principles such as ego defense (e.g., repression and
projection) and psychogenic, developmental stages concerned largely with the libido (sexual
life) formulated in essentially biological terms.
About twenty years later, two other European movements attracted wide attention. One
involved a systematic study of cultural history in a new key. The other required a distinctive
scrutiny of the individual’s personal experience under the name “phenomenology.” At certain
points these two approaches intersected. The latter, however, was a highly specialized exam-
ination of human consciousness, while the former directed attention to societal behavior in
which cultural characteristics defined the individual. Thus emerged a distinction between
two types of science, the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften, a distinction
first made by Wilhelm Dilthey in 1894 and accepted by his pupil, Eduard Spranger, among
others.7 The Naturwissenschaften embraced the natural sciences, such as physics, chemistry
and biology; the Geisteswissenschaften focused on the cultural sciences as these reflect the
shaping of the individual person by the culture. While the principles of the natural sciences
explained phenomena, the objective of the cultural sciences was to describe and to under-
stand individuals in a total context. For Spranger, values, supplementing the impersonal
principles of cause and effect, were now formulated by him as a necessary new category for
comprehending the human individual.8 From 1914 onward, he described these value atti-
tudes, called, in German, Lebensformen, under six headings. These constituted a hierarchy at
the top of which stood the religious orientation. The extent to which an individual shared
these values might vary in degree so that any one person combined these values in a special
manner. Spranger maintained that only in these terms could one understand human behavior,
a goal not achieved in the terms of general, experimental psychology.
By a striking coincidence, in the year 1894 (when Dilthey introduced the distinc-
tion between the natural and the cultural sciences) the historian of philosophy, Wilhelm
Windelband, formulated a distinction between the nomothetic and the idiographic scientific
approaches.9 Nomothetic principles were formulated by the natural sciences, whereas the id-
iographic was the objective of the professional historian. The resemblance between the nomo-
thetic and the natural sciences, on the one hand, and the idiographic and the cultural sciences,
on the other, is readily understood once the two distinctions are juxtaposed.10 Closely related
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IDIOGRAPHIC VIS-À-VIS IDIODYNAMIC 407

to the Geisteswissenschaften was the orientation of the personalistic psychology of William
Stern of Hamburg. For him a crucial dichotomy opposed impersonal facts (involving
“things”) to events pertaining to the person. This distinction had to be respected from the very
beginning of observation.11

ALLPORT’S “IDIOGRAPHIC” (1937) AND ROSENZWEIG’S “IDIODYNAMIC” (1951)

The above historical background facilitates an understanding of what Allport attempted
to do when he published his monumental textbook of personality in 1937.12 In it, he con-
trasted the approach of general psychology, which he termed nomothetic, with his own pre-
ferred approach that emphasized the uniqueness of the single individual (idiographic).
Allport was following Windelband but applying the distinction to the history of the normal
person, not necessarily a person of historic significance or fame. But he did not emphasize
the continuity of development. Instead he stressed “functional autonomy,” which played
down influences from the past on present motivation.
Allport was not greatly interested in psychoneurotic individuals, such as Freud studied
in his psychodynamic approach. But Allport did not intend to exclude from the psychology
of personality the study of universal principles of behavior, e.g., those of perception or learn-
ing. He, however, stressed that the idiographic approach was far more relevant in illuminat-
ing the understanding of the individual and that, as such, it was the primary concern of
personality theory. Earlier he had done empirical work on human traits, and these units be-
came centrally important in his 1937 textbook. Not only were traits organized in a unique
configuration, but the individual displayed unique individual traits in addition to the traits he
shared in common with others.
It is essential to recognize that Allport had been exposed between 1920 and 1930 to
William Stern’s personalistic psychology by a period of study in Hamburg; and some
months earlier he had listened to the lectures of Eduard Spranger in Berlin. Spranger, as
above noted, had stressed the importance of Lebensformen (ideal types of value attitudes).
But in Allport’s 1937 textbook, he did not utilize the ideas of either Stern or Spranger in a
substantial way. He was more obviously opposed to the psychodynamic formulations of
Freud, which he contrasted with his emphasis on contemporary “functional autonomy.” To
emphasize fixation in the past, let alone fixation of a sexual kind, was not compatible with
Allport’s outlook.13
Around 1950 and, more comprehensively, in 1958 in an article entitled “The Place of
the Individual and of Idiodynamics in Psychology,” Saul Rosenzweig introduced the idiody-
namic approach to the study of the individual. In that article, idiodynamics was formulated
as an orientation that focused directly on phenomenological events and took the dynamics
of behavior as the fundamental ground for systematization in all of psychology.14 Whereas
Allport’s idiographic approach emphasized the unique structure of the personality with re-
spect to traits, idiodynamics emphasized events derived from forces within the individual in
their intimate relationship with the environment. From an idiodynamic perspective, the start-
ing point in personality theory should be the unique interrelatedness of the individual’s pop-
ulation of events, i.e., the idioverse. Thus, the conception of the idioverse replaced the
“personality” and the “person.”15
Idiodynamics afforded a paradigm that included two persisting milieus: on the one hand, a
biogenic milieu contributes to the matrix of the idioverse in the terms of organic
and genetic influences; on the other, a sociogenic milieu contributes cultural influences.
Both of these relatively permanent transmitters blend and are transformed to provide the
signals for the complete understanding of any given human event in idiodynamic and
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408 SAUL ROSENZWEIG AND SHERRI L. FISHER

phenomenological terms. While it endures, this vehicle — the matrix of the idioverse — is psy-
chologically paramount, and its norms make intelligible to the prepared observer the individual
who feels, thinks, and acts. The temporal aspect of experience is crucial. While, in the matrix of
the idioverse, everything is of present tense, the genetic milieu tends to stress derivation from
the biological past, and these inputs interact with those from the cultural past. All of these inputs
converge in the adaptively creative and future-oriented matrix of events. In that matrix, the per-
sonal present and the personal past mingle as do perception and memory.
Moreover, three distinct types of norms are recognized (cf. Figure 1). These norms pro-
vide the keys for understanding the individual: (1) universal norms, which derive from the
principles of general psychology; (2) group norms, which stem from statistical generaliza-
tions based on given cultures or classes; and (3) individual norms, which stem from recur-
rent or repeated events during the life span. The concept of association affords an
enlightening illustration. The principles of association (similarity, contiguity, etc.), described
by the early Greek thinkers and still recognized in present-day theories of learning, employ
norms that appear to be universally valid. These principles were the basis for the spate of ex-
perimental studies carried out in Wundt’s first laboratory following up the pioneer work of
Galton who invented the word association technique.16 But even there it was soon recog-
nized that certain groups of individuals, including mental patients of a given diagnosis, pro-
duce associations peculiar to or characteristic of these groups. In these terms, certain kinds
of associations consistently emitted by an individual helped to classify him or her as belong-
ing to a given group (e.g., the clang associations of the manic patient). Finally, in the psy-
choanalytic research on complexes, the individual or individualized potential of word
associations was studied as pointing to a unique organization or constellation of thoughts,
images, and feelings in one particular case.17
By this third set of norms, the individual becomes his or her own standard of reference:

. . . he [or she] is to be understood “in his own terms.” Such concepts as private world,
private language, the individual population of events, self-concept, and phenomenologi-
cal reality are all intended to highlight the importance of the individual as his [or her]
own context of interpretation. The method of free association was in psychology — as
contrasted with literature — the first thorough, though unformulated, application of this
standpoint. By such standards ‘the person is always right,’ i.e., everything he [or she]

FIGURE 1.
Three types of explanatory and predictive norms. [From: Rosenzweig, S. Freud and Experimental
Psychology: The Emergence of Idiodynamics, 1986. (2nd rev. ed.). St. Louis: Rana House and New
York: McGraw – Hill].

THREE TYPES OF EXPLANATORY AND PREDICTIVE NORMS

NOMOTHETIC FUNCTIONAL PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY,

(Universal) CONSIDERED VALID BY AND LARGE.

DEMOGRAPHIC STATISTICAL GENERALIZATIONS DERIVED FROM

(Group) PARTICULAR CULTURES OR CLASSES OF INDIVIDUALS.

IDIODYNAMIC DISTINCTIVE MARKERS RECURRING IN A GIVEN,

(Individual) SINGLE POPULATION OF EVENTS (IDIOVERSE).

NOTE: Each type of norm not only involves a different mode of understanding but implies
a cognate basis for predicting and/or controlling behavior.
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IDIOGRAPHIC VIS-À-VIS IDIODYNAMIC 409

does is characteristic of him [or her], and it becomes the business of idiodynamics and
clinical practice to make even the most bizarre behavior intelligible in terms of the indi-
vidual’s experience, needs, and their organization.18

ALLPORT’S INITIAL REACTION TO IDIODYNAMICS

Rosenzweig, trained at Harvard, had remained a friend and occasional correspondent of
Allport since the early 1930’s. After reading Rosenzweig’s above-mentioned article, Allport
wrote him a letter, dated 30 June 1958:

Dear Saul:
I have just read with maximum enthusiasm your Dialogue in the May ’58 Jl. of In-
dividual Psychology. Without doubt it is the best statement of the issue that has haunted
me for 30 years, better than my own various skirmishes with it.
How can I get 15 or 20 reprints? I’ll gladly pay for them — if you ordered, or
could order, enough. I want my 2d year Grad. seminar to read same — and be edified.
While my own emphasis has been unique “structure” I think I have consistently
implied “idiodynamics” — so there is no quarrel between us, and I agree with your neat
analysis of norms . . .
One disagreement only: middle of p. 15 you say that the self-concept approach is
descriptive, not predictive. Surely you can’t believe this. If you want to predict my be-
havior you’ll do much better to ask my intentions and plans than to analyze all the pro-
jective tests you can give me, or otherwise explore my dismal unconscious!
Apart from this, let me say again you have written about the wisest essay I have
seen in 30 years! Salaams,
Ever,
Gordon19

Rosenzweig was happy to furnish the requested reprints, and on September 24, follow-
ing the seminar, Allport wrote to Rosenzweig and summarized the reaction of the partici-
pants. In particular, Allport commented on factor analysis in personality theory as explicated
by Raymond Cattell,20 whose “inverse factor analysis” he did not find to be an appropriate
representation of the individual. In replying to this letter, Rosenzweig raised some questions
of his own about idiodynamics, e.g., the definition of the event — the basic unit of idiody-
namics — vis-à-vis the concept of trait. Rosenzweig wrote, in part, as follows:

What I am fishing for is a clearer statement of how your unique trends [traits] are to be
arrived at — by what methods if these are not merely to be those employed by the factor
analysts . . . You could doubtless counter by asking me what I am here asking you:
How do I arrive at a definition of a given idioverse? My answer would be that the two
endeavors are not identical; I am not really aiming to list unique traits . . . but rather
to depict a unique idioverse of events. For me the nature of these events and of their or-
ganization, both potentially unique, becomes the important task. As you will see, I am
here pointing up the difference between the psychograph and the idioverse.
The substitution of trend for trait [which Allport had suggested] is, I think, an im-
provement but on the whole, as you will also see from the foregoing, I like events still
better as a basic term. Then one would need other units of a more complex nature to de-
fine the specific types of organization of events in the idioverse.21

In this perspective, a further word regarding the concept of event is appropriate. While
a variable of this kind might have been too vague a generation or more ago, there has
now been sufficient advancement in the logic of science and the science of logic to permit
the use of such a unit without fear of being charged with intuitive vagueness. As modern
physics continued to demolish the old materialism of the nineteenth century, objects or
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410 SAUL ROSENZWEIG AND SHERRI L. FISHER

things gradually yielded to processes, including dynamic entities such as events. Though this
is hardly the place to enter into questions of ontology, mention may be made of some of the
recent concerns in works on symbolic logic with the concept of event and the calculus of the
individual.22 Of similar relevance is the important distinction in the field of current memory
research between “episodic” (or autobiographical) and “semantic” (or generic) memories.23
In the present context it is of interest that this distinction has lately become the focus of con-
siderable research in which the event is the basic unit of analysis.24 In a work by Endel
Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory (1983), the author discusses “mental processes as
events” in a manner that could equally apply to idiodynamics. Even more recently there is a
chapter, “On the Making of Episodes,” in which previous research and some new investiga-
tions are reported on the crucial problem of the integration of event and context.25 The con-
ception of the event is, therefore, very important in the new look at memory. This trend tends
to support the role of the event as the point of departure in idiodynamics. The vista opens
here for similar investigative efforts in the broader region of the idioverse.
All these contributions demonstrate that the idioverse can be studied as a universe of
experiential events — as a population for quantitative as well as qualitative analysis. For pre-
sent purposes, an event is, then, an experiential, dynamic unit in the course of a life which
has a demonstrable effect upon a succeeding event or upon a series of such events.26
No answer to Rosenzweig’s letter is available, but in Allport’s textbook, Pattern and
Growth in Personality, published in 1961 as a radical version of the 1937 book, Allport in-
troduced a section entitled, “Three Sets of Norms.”27 He did not, surprisingly, refer to the de-
rivation of this approach from Rosenzweig’s 1958 paper. Instead he referred to Kluckhohn,
Murray, and Schneider’s Personality in Nature, Society and Culture, published in 1953 and
cited the schema they presented in the following modified way:

“Every man is in certain respects:

a. like all other men (universal norms)
b. like some other men (group norms)
c. like no other men (idiosyncratic norms)”28

A highly significant difference between the source and Allport’s modification of it was
the addition in parentheses of the terms “universal norms,” “group norms” and “idiosyncratic
norms.” Kluckhohn et al. did not employ the concept of norms, let alone the classification
“universal,” “group” and “idiosyncratic.” Allport was clearly assimilating the 1958 formula-
tion by Rosenzweig to their superficially similar schema. Moreover, Allport substituted
“idiosyncratic” for “idiodynamic.” He elaborated on the classification of norms by means of
a chart (Figure 2) in which he graphically portrayed the three sets of norms, now labeling the
third set as “individual norms.” He also added the term “idiodynamics” in the part of the fig-
ure devoted to “individual norms.” Allport was implicitly combining Rosenzweig’s system-
atic formulation with the schema of Kluckhohn et al., but, in the process, he failed to address
the concept of norms as such and, more importantly, he mistakenly equated the idiodynamic
norms of Rosenzweig with what he called “idiosyncratic norms.”29
In a paragraph he then devoted to “individual norms,” Allport gave an example of
an individual named “Sam,” the personal pattern of whose traits or interests is peculiar to
him so that one says about the behavior that emerges from that pattern, “How characteristic
of him.” Allport then added, “To the study of this personal pattern Rosenzweig has applied
the term idiodynamics,” and he cited in a footnote the article of 1958. A paragraph followed
in which universal, group and individual norms were considered in their interrelationship.
But Allport wrote about that interrelationship as if it differed from Rosenzweig’s presenta-
tion of idiodynamics and stated, “Our argument here is, as indicated in Figure 1, that the
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IDIOGRAPHIC VIS-À-VIS IDIODYNAMIC 411

FIGURE 2.
Three sets of norms utilized in the psychology of personality [From G. W. Allport. Pattern and Growth
in Personality, 1961. Fig. 1, p. 13].

Universal Norms Group Norms Individual Norms

General psychology Sociocultural Idiodynamics

sciences
psychophysics
psychophysiology

;
psychobiology
;
Psychology of
: personality

psychology of personality cannot proceed by generalities alone, nor by individualities alone,

but ‘occupies an intermediate position.’ ” He continued: “Although we accept the formula of
three sets of norms, we should guard against one pitfall” — described as an implication that
the individual is only a handful of residual idiosyncrasies left over after we have accounted
for most of the person’s behavior in terms of universal and group norms. But, Allport
avowed, “His personality does not contain three systems, but only one. Individuality is not
the residual ragbag left over after the nomothetic sciences have had their say. The organiza-
tion of the individual life is first, last, and all the time a primary fact of human nature.”30

ALLPORT, AMBIVALENT, FINALLY ABANDONS “IDIOGRAPHIC”

A better succinct summary of the purview of idiodynamics as expounded in Rosenzweig’s
1958 paper would be difficult to achieve, but Allport, again, missed this point. Moreover, in a
paper that he published in 1962 entitled, “The General and the Unique in Psychological Sci-
ence,” he repeated the same argument, step-by-step, and this time made no reference at all to
the 1958 publication by Rosenzweig.31
It thus appears that Allport’s agreement with the idiodynamic formulation, that he had
enthusiastically endorsed in 1958, led him later to equate that position with his own. The
schema of Kluckhohn et al. that he had discovered may have facilitated a confused assimila-
tion. The inference is that Allport was seeking a better understanding of what he had called
the “idiographic,” and he seemed to have found it in idiodynamics.
Yet he had actually failed to grasp the idiodynamic conceptualization. He had over-
looked the difference between the phenomenological event in idiodynamics and the empiri-
cal trait in his approach. He did not clearly recognize that the idioverse is not only a universe
of events (not traits) but that it has a unique patterning or structure. It is hence not surprising
that in his writings about the person after 1962, Allport no longer referred to idiodynamics
nor did he allude to the three sets of norms.
Allport’s discomforture with the conception of individuality persisted, however, and, in the
1962 paper above-cited, he developed a distinction between the “dimensional” and the “mor-
phogenic” (the latter term taken over from biology) as a substitute for the “nomothetic” vis-à-vis
the “idiographic.” He pointed out that in molecular biology the common elements that appear
across the board are differentiated by their patterning. This unique patterning was crucial, and
he now adopted the term “morphogenic” in his revised personality theory. He wrote: “It is, I
think, a good term, better than ‘idiographic,’ which so many students of personality misuse and
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412 SAUL ROSENZWEIG AND SHERRI L. FISHER

misspell. I hope the concept ‘morphogenic’ catches on, but even more do I hope that the type of
research to which I have ventured to apply the label will flourish and spread.”32 But it did not
happen. However, in view of Allport’s recommendation, it is remarkable that in his autobiogra-
phy,33 published five years later, the year of his death, he never once mentioned “idiographic,”
not even when he discussed the writing and publication of his textbook of 1937! That fact, not
hitherto noted, contradicts Allport’s alleged legacy to personality theory, which, when re-
counted, invariably emphasizes that very concept and term.34
A notable step in Allport’s attempt to resolve the problem of uniqueness appeared in his
nearly last paper, “Traits Revisited.” In it he undertook to report what he had learned during
the preceding thirty-six years. He first presented the paper at the 1965 convention of the
American Psychological Association on the occasion of accepting the award for “distin-
guished scientific contributions.”35 In it he attempted to resolve the problem of individuality
by introducing a “heuristic realism” that he illustrated with three exemplary studies.36 In one
example (Letters from Jenny, 1965), he considered the correlation of measures of religious
orientation with various scales of prejudice. In a section headed “Personal Dispositions: An
Idiomorphic Approach” he compared Jenny’s core personality as depicted by “common-
sense traits” vis-à-vis “factorial traits” and named this comparison an “essentially idiomor-
phic trait study.” He also cited an earlier investigation in which subjects were asked to judge
“essential characteristics” of designated friends. This project showed that the judges em-
ployed an average of only 7.2 trait names to describe these characteristics. He proceeded to
question the usefulness of formal methods of personality analysis and asked whether these
methods added significantly to the common sense approach. He ended the section with the
following statement: “In ascribing a list of traits to Jenny, we may seem to have used a di-
mensional method, but such is not the case. Jenny’s traits emerge from her own personal
structure. They are not imposed but predetermined by largely irrelevant schedules.”37 In the
“Conclusion,” he then asked whether much is gained by a formal schedule of traits and ended
by calling into question “four decades of labor on my part.” He modestly wondered whether,
under the circumstances, “I should in all decency cry ‘uncle’ and retire to my corner.”38
In perusing this summing up, one is struck by the sudden use of the new term “idiomor-
phic.” Allport did not define it, though he employed it in the section heading and in the text as
seemingly self-explanatory. Was he here implicitly considering (and rejecting) the term “idio-
dynamic” — an orientation that, indeed, also eschews a formal listing of traits and permits trait
names to emerge ad hoc from the total publication of events that constitutes the idioverse?
Allport’s stress on the idiographic (as combined with the nomothetic) was originally in-
tended to underscore personal uniqueness, but his preoccupation with demographic traits,
rather than phenomenological events, fell short of idiodynamic. In subsequent years,
Rosenzweig, on his part, further developed the purview of idiodynamics by clarifying the
idioverse and by formulating more precisely the three types of norms. These norms he
re-named nomothetic, demographic, and idiodynamic — to avoid the fallacy of defining each
type by the size of N. It should by now be evident that the idiodynamic differs from the
idiographic by referring not to a statistical N of 1 (with traits peculiar to it), but to a universe
of multiple events. In this schema, a unique dynamic organization through time distinguishes
each individual from others by providing an account of behavior in terms of a peculiar de-
velopmental history. From the repetitive dynamic events in the idioverse, idiodynamic
norms are derived. These norms, in peculiar conjunction with nomothetic principles and
demographic generalizations, afford the three necessary keys to a given idioverse.
It is only fair to state that in the years between 1937 and 1961, particularly in the 1961
version of his personality textbook, Allport made various attempts to disavow the static and
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IDIOGRAPHIC VIS-À-VIS IDIODYNAMIC 413

structural emphasis of his trait theory. For example, he gave a series of lectures at Yale entitled
Becoming, in which he introduced the concept of the “proprium” as referring to “unabashed
self-seeking.”39 Allport was aware, as indicated in a footnote, that this concept derived from
Emanuel Swedenborg who used it in “the narrow sense of selfishness and pride,” but he failed to
mention that Swedenborg was the leader of a transcendental religious movement. Was there per-
haps more than superficially appears in Allport’s borrowing from this theologian?
The title of his second textbook coupled “growth” with “pattern.” Allport was clearly mak-
ing an effort to bring out what he considered to be the implicit, dynamic intent of his position.40
But he had consistently repudiated Freud’s psychoanalytic orientation, which he considered to
be “reductive” — a violation of “functional autonomy.” In that stance he appeared again not fully
to have comprehended the purview of idiodynamics, which stressed the continuity of past with
present and which, furthermore, involved a present-future creative emphasis.
Many psychologists have had difficulty in accepting one aspect of Allport’s theory, i.e.,
his emphasis on discontinuity.41 Allport believed that the mature individual is divorced from
past history, that is, there is no important personality continuum from childhood to adulthood.
Thus, his concept of “functional autonomy” was based on the idea that a motive can become
detached from the past experiences in which it originated to serve as an autonomous drive. As
he explained: “What was once extrinsic and instrumental becomes intrinsic and impelling.”42
Allport’s negative opinion of Freudian psychodynamics may be partially explained by
this preference for discontinuity. He viewed psychodynamics as gratuitously reductive and
restrictive and, as explained by Bem Allen, he thought that “psychologists would do well to
look for and recognize open and obvious motivations, rather than immediately probe the
dark depths of the unconscious.”43
Moreover, some of Allport’s antagonism to Freud’s reductive interpretations may have
come implicitly into play in his ambivalence toward idiodynamics; for, in common with psy-
choanalysis, idiodynamics includes the crucial role of early events in shaping later behavior
patterns. One of Allport’s objectives in emphasizing “functional autonomy” was to dismiss,
or, at least, diminish, reductive explanations.44 In some religious orientations, e.g., the “born
again Christian,” one finds the same essential idea: spiritual enlightenment often rises sud-
denly, like St. Paul’s sudden conversion on the road to Damascus, with a divorce from the
past.

THE RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION OF ALLPORT’S IDIOVERSE

In the foregoing section we have been largely concerned with a differential diagnosis.
Let us turn now to the etiological sources of Allport’s alienation from idiodynamics. The
chief basis is an implicit religious parameter that pervades Allport’s idioverse, including his
philosophy of life. Thus in his book, The Person God Is, Peter Bertocci, a close friend and
colleague of Allport, asserted: “All books on the psychology of the personality are at the
same time books on the philosophy of the person.”45 He accordingly maintained that the spir-
itual aspect of the concept “person” was implicit in Allport’s theory of personality. A decade
after the death of Allport, Bertocci edited and published a series of thirty-three meditations
delivered by Allport in Appleton Chapel on the Harvard campus from the years 1938 to 1966,
the year before he died. The collection appeared under the title, Waiting for the Lord.46
This religious dimension appears to have become most articulated in the last twenty
years of Allport’s life. As will be shown below, it was clearly set forth in his Lowell Lectures
of 1950 upon which his book, The Individual and His Religion, was based.47 It is there patent
that Allport’s religious commitment involved an emphasis upon uniqueness — the uniqueness
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of the human spirit — which found expression in his stress upon the idiographic in personal-
ity theory.48 This characteristic was not adventitious; it permeated his entire biography.
Allport was the youngest of four children, all sons, reared in an atmosphere steeped in
religion. The home environment was “marked by plain Protestant piety and hard work. My
mother had been a school teacher and brought to her sons an eager sense of philosophical
questing and the importance of searching for ultimate religious answers.”49
Gordon’s continuous attachment to his mother was attested by the fact that in 1937,
when he was forty years old and she was five years from the end of her life, he dedicated his
first major book, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, to her. In 1944, two years after
her death, he compiled and privately published a memoir about her entitled, The Quest of
Nellie Wise Allport, based on her own writings with many passages from her diary and a se-
lection of her original poems.50 Two years later, Allport published in the Journal of Abnormal
and Social Psychology, of which he was then editor, the “Letters from Jenny” that, in ex-
panded form, he edited and published as a book twenty years later.51 The focus in both Nellie
and Jenny was on an intense mother-son relationship. It is now known through the research of
David Winter that the couple to whom the letters of Jenny were addressed was, in fact, Gor-
don and (Mrs.) Ada Allport, disguised as “Glenn” and “Isabel.”52
The piety of Gordon’s mother played a powerful role throughout his life. In the year be-
fore his birth (1896), she expressed in her diary an ardent wish that her sons (she had three
by then) would seek not wealth, fame, or worldly honors, but would instead devote their
lives to the service of Christ by fostering social welfare.53 When Gordon was six and was
suffering from a serious illness, a Methodist missionary was living in the Allport home, and
Gordon vividly recalled that fact during an interview at the height of his career. In that con-
nection it is noteworthy that immediately after graduating from Harvard College at age
twenty-two, Gordon undertook a three-year stint at the Methodist Missionary School of
Robert College in Istanbul, Turkey. He was to serve there as a teacher of English, along with
other duties. But after less than a year, he began having misgivings about this first step in his
professional life. Accordingly, through complicated negotiations in which his older brother,
Floyd, then an instructor in psychology at Harvard, played an important part, Gordon re-
signed from this post and returned to the United States to become a graduate student in the
same field. However, he continued to express his religious interests by resuming a relation-
ship, begun as an undergraduate, with the Harvard Department of Social Ethics under the
chairmanship of Richard Cabot. Throughout these early academic activities, the strong ma-
ternal influence, present since childhood, was guiding him.
Gordon’s father, John Edwards Allport, was a salesman who in later years studied to be-
come a physician. In the fall of 1896, when he already had three children, he decided to
complete his medical education and with his family moved to Baltimore to attend the Uni-
versity of Maryland Medical College. From Nellie Allport’s journal, edited by Gordon, we
learn that while Nellie was pregnant with a fourth child [Gordon], the father became seri-
ously entangled in a violation of federal law. Gordon wrote:

Many pages of the Journal are torn out between April 9 and September 20 as if to eradi-
cate the most difficult and trying days of her life. The missing story she felt as shame. It
cannot be told in detail since there are insufficient records for its reconstruction. But in
essence it runs as follows: Shortly before his [medical school] graduation, her husband
was summoned to appear for a violation of some drug patents. He had purchased in
Canada and sold in this country some common and harmless drug. In so doing he had
made a profit but (probably unknowingly) had violated patent rights. When officers
came to the door with a summons, Ed vaulted the back fence and skipped out . . . 54
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The wife and children moved separately from Baltimore to Fulton (NY), and he communi-
cated secretly with them “while he was seeking a new place of residence and sanctuary [for
all of them].”55
Despite the editorial euphemisms, Ed Allport had apparently smuggled drugs from
Canada to the U.S. as a desperate means for supporting his family while he was still a stu-
dent of medicine. When the law caught up with him, he escaped to Montezuma, Indiana, and
the family later moved to Fulton. From there they joined him after he had established a
livelihood in Montezuma.
The relevance here is that Gordon was born in Montezuma during a period of family
disgrace. Yet he conscientiously described the events in editing his mother’s journal. He thus
recounted the conditions of poverty and flight from arrest under which his mother carried
him to birth. One is reminded of the account in the Gospel of St. Matthew of the flight into
Egypt of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus to escape harassment by Herod’s officers (a story
that Gordon certainly knew). This analogy was in all probability part of Gordon’s “guiding
fiction” when in later life he returned to his childhood years and reviewed the religious com-
mitment entailed to him by his pious mother.
After a period of further hardship, the father eventually became a socially active doctor
who personally, as well as through the Methodist Church in which his wife continuously in-
volved him, extended his work to patients who sometimes lived in their home. In his early
practice, while living in the Midwest, he organized or established clinics and hospitals, and
in the latter portion of his life, he did likewise in Hollywood, California. He, and years later
his wife, died in California after a joint career in medicine and social work.
Gordon’s relationship to his father, John, was, by contrast with that to his mother, trou-
blesome. In an interview cited below, Allport characterized his father as “a hard man” who
lacked understanding. When Dr. Allport died in September, 1923, Gordon was in Cam-
bridge, England, under a fellowship from Harvard. His intense grief over this event was
mixed with feelings of guilt from which he found solace in the religious atmosphere with
which the city was imbued. In his correspondence, he made special mention of this helpful
religious ambiance with its numerous chapels and churches. At that time he also faithfully
attended the services of the Anglo-Catholic Church. Three months later, after he had moved
to Berlin, Germany, to continue his studies, he underwent a period of indoctrination that cul-
minated in December with his baptism as a member of that church.56
It is striking that right after his father’s death Gordon sought a refuge from obsessive am-
bivalent grief derived from this problematic paternal relationship. By formal affiliation as an An-
glo-Catholic he would profitably receive the Sacrament of Penance (confessional) and this might
have provided a corrective for the painful conflict connected with his relationship to his father.
With this background it is easier to comprehend Allport’s professional connections with
Harvard and how, in 1922, soon after obtaining his Ph.D. in Psychology there, he became an
instructor in the Department of Social Ethics (1924 – 1926) under Cabot, founder and head
of that department.57 Richard Cabot was simultaneously Professor of Clinical Medicine at
Harvard Medical School (1918 – 1933) and Professor of Social Ethics (1920 – 1934). Under
Cabot, Allport offered his first course in personality — on personality in its relationship to
the social evils of poverty and infirmity. After serving with Cabot until 1924, Allport moved
to the Psychology Department at Dartmouth for several years, then returned to Harvard in
1930 as Assistant Professor of Psychology. By 1937, he had completed the development of
his personality theory by implicitly transforming his religious commitment to what he char-
acterized as the special idiographic approach — which he considered to be essential and sup-
plementary to the nomothetic.
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416 SAUL ROSENZWEIG AND SHERRI L. FISHER

Looking back one readily pictures Gordon as the youngest son of his mother from
whom he received constant support. Moreover, he markedly resembled her in somatotype
whereas his three brothers appear to have resembled their father, in an athletic body type.
These and other facts suggest that Gordon, the youngest of four children (all boys),
was intensely identified with his mother, rather than with his father. Conflict regarding
that identification may have caused difficulties in his relationship with the father. These
inferences suggest the presence of an inverted parental complex, in which the mother pre-
dominated. This hypothesis recalls Gordon’s conspicuous opposition to Freudian the-
ory — an antagonism conspicuously described in the autobiography that he wrote during
the final year of his life. One does not need to be a Freudian to suspect that this hostility
to Freud derived not just from a brief personal encounter in Vienna on the return trip
from Istanbul in 1920, but was rooted in his implicit awareness that he was himself a very
apt candidate for the cardinal constructs in the developmental theory of Freudian psycho-
analysis.
The religious underpinning of Allport’s personality theory is seldom recognized by
textbook writers. It was, however, clearly disclosed by Ian Nicholson. Nicholson began by
referring to Anne Roe’s 1953 biographical study of 64 eminent scientists, including fourteen
psychologists of whom one was Gordon Allport.58 He continued:

After seeing a draft copy of the study, Gordon Allport wrote to Roe an uncharacteristi-
cally testy letter: ‘Three times a statement is made that must be erroneous if I am in-
cluded . . . You state that none of your group is religious. Well, I attend church
regularly and would further maintain I find more wisdom concerning mind, values, con-
duct and therapy in Christian doctrine than . . . in our beloved but still puerile science
of psychology.’ 59

Allport’s book on religion (1950) is clearly apposite here. In it he traced the evolution
of his own concept of self and of person. He concluded:

My concept of the person may by now be even divested of corporeal attributes without
thereby losing its insistent character. God Himself I may declare to be the supreme ex-
pression of personality, a necessary and final value required to explain and to conserve
all other values of selfhood.60

In the light of Allport’s religious commitment, it is striking that in his autobiography he

never addresses this topic except for the brief mention, quoted above, about the Methodist
pietism of his childhood home. In passing he does refer to his Lowell Lectures on religion
which resulted in his 1950 book, but, in a paragraph about his friendship with Peter Bertocci
of Boston University, he refers only to Bertocci’s “personalistic philosophy,” not his books
on religion. One gets the impression that Allport thus downplays his religious orientation lest
that aspect of his lifestyle adversely affect his scientific reputation among psychologists. Was
there an element of strategic disingenuousness in this omission?
In the last year of his life, speaking as the first incumbent of the Richard Cabot Pro-
fessorship of Social Ethics at Harvard, Allport gave an invited address at the matricula-
tion Dinner of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. His message was stated
in these words: “It is true that every human being is beset by problems, but he is also
haunted by mystery. To help him solve nothing but his problems is to minister to half a
man.”61 He proceeded to argue that problems may ultimately be solved by scientific ob-
servation and reasoning, but the mysteries of life and of ontology will continue to remain
matters of postulation and faith. It was for theology, he said, not psychology, to address
these mysteries.
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CONCLUSION
Although Gordon Allport’s contribution to personality theory was highly influential, it
remained scientifically unconsummated. It was, in the end, subordinated by him to the un-
solvable mysteries of ontology that, he believed, belong in the legitimate domain of ax-
iomatic faith. The idiodynamic orientation differs from Allport’s idiographic by staying
empirically closer to the events of individual experience, by stressing continuity and creativ-
ity, and by formulating three types of explanatory and complementary norms for the compre-
hension of human behavior. Moreover, idiodynamics does not comprise a spiritual
parameter. However, if a particular idioverse contains a religious marker, as did Gordon
Allport’s, that dimension is necessarily to be considered. In that light it becomes more intel-
ligible that, though Allport was enthusiastically receptive in 1958 to an idiodynamic orienta-
tion, after 1961 he may have been impeded by aspects of his own idioverse from continuing
to accept it. For, in the final analysis, spiritual values outweighed positivistic empiricism in
Allport’s philosophy of life.

NOTES
1. See, for example, Fifty Years of Personality Psychology Kenneth H. Craik, Robert Hogan, and Raymond N.
Wolfe, eds. (New York: Plenum Press, 1993).
2. For this historical background, see Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychologi-
cal Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Saul Rosenzweig, “Norms and the Individual in
the Psychologist’s Perspective,” in Feelings and Emotions: The Mooseheart Symposium, M. L. Reymert, ed. (New
York: McGraw – Hill, 1950): 327 – 335.
3. Wilhelm Wundt, Outlines of Psychology (Leipzig: Englemann, 1907).
4. This statement regarding Wundt’s orientation refers primarily to his earlier contributions and to the influence he
exerted in America through the rather selective emphasis of Edward B. Titchener who received his Ph.D. under Wundt at
Leipzig in 1892. It was through Titchener that most American psychologists of that generation knew about Wundt and
believed him to be a “structuralist” like Titchener who limited scientific psychology to facts acquired by observers
trained in introspection. In fact, Wundt in the totality of his career had a broad purview which included what is today
called social psychology. To that scientific area he contributed his Völkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwick-
lungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus, und Sitte (Leipzig: Engelmann) which appeared in ten volumes over a period of
twenty years (1900 – 1920). The year 1920 was the year of his death. An abridged English translation of the first five vol-
umes was published under the title Elements of Folk Psychology: Outlines of a Psychological History of the Develop-
ment of Mankind (New York: Macmillan, 1916). The biased and partial nature of Wundt’s reputation has recently been
strenuously corrected by psychologists like Arthur L. Blumenthal. For example, see Arthur Blumenthal, “A Reappraisal
of Wilhelm Wundt,” American Psychologist 30 (1975): 1081 – 1088. See also the collective volume Wilhelm Wundt and
the Making of a Scientific Psychology R. W. Rieber, Ed. (New York: Plenum Press, 1980); and Wundt Studies: A Centen-
nial Collection Wolfgang G. Bringmann and Ryan D. Tweney, Eds. (Toronto: C. J. Hogrefe, 1980). In this context it has
not been sufficiently stressed that the extra-physiological (experimental) work of Wundt was done in the last fourth of
his life, long after his more influential American students, like G. S. Hall and Titchener had known him in Leipzig.
Oddly enough, and unlike Wundt’s American students, his contributions to folk psychology were recognized and cited
by the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who in 1911 – 1913 discussed Wundt’s extensive treatment of
totemism, taboos and exogamy in his own book Totem and Taboo in the Standard Edition of Sigmund Freud’s Complete
Psychological Works, volume 13, (London, Hogarth Press, 1955): 1 – 161. Despite the recent repudiation of Titchener’s
alleged one-sided interpretation of Wundt’s contribution to psychology, Titchener himself in a generous tribute to his
early mentor, published as an obituary that included the Völkerpsychologie, came to the prophetic conclusion: “. . . If a
man is to gain his niche in history he must have the total vision, the generative idea. . . . In this sense I am prepared to
say that Wundt is the founder, not of experimental psychology alone, but of psychology. . . . But the dominant idea of
Wundt’s life, the idea upon which his reputation is most solidly based, the idea that persisted with him to the very end of
his university activity, is the idea of an experimental psychology.” See American Journal of Psychology 32 (1921):
161 – 178.
5. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883).
6. Cf. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1962),
volume 3, passim.
7. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie,” Sitzungsberichten der
Königl Preussiskchen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1894).
8. Eduard Spranger, Lebensforemen: Geisteswissenschaftliche Psychologie und Ethik der Persönlichkeit, 1st
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418 SAUL ROSENZWEIG AND SHERRI L. FISHER

edition (Halle: Verlag von Max Niemeyer, 1921). Eduard Spranger, Types of Men: The Psychology and Ethics of
Personality, 5th ed., P. J. W. Pigors, Trans. (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1928).
9. Wilhelm Windelband, Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft, 3rd ed. (Strassburg: Heitz, 1894).
10. It is not strictly true that the classification of the Geisteswissenschaften necessarily implies an idiographic ori-
entation. The point is more correctly conceptualized in the formulation of three types of norms called for in the
idiodynamic purview, in which demographic norms, along with the nomothetic and idiodynamic, allow for what is
collectively embraced under Geisteswissenschaften.
11. See William Stern, Person und Sache: System des Kritischen Personalismus (Leipzig: Barth, 1923) 3 volumes;
and William Stern, General Psychology from the Personalistic Standpoint, H. D. Spoerl, Trans. (New York:
Macmillan, 1938).
12. See Gordon W. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1937).
13. Ibid., pp. 22 – 23.
14. Saul Rosenzweig, “The Place of the Individual and of Idiodynamics in Psychology: A Dialogue,” Journal of
Individual Psychology 14 (1958): 3 – 20.
15. Cf. Saul Rosenzweig, “Idiodynamics in Personality Theory with Special Reference to Projective Methods,”
Psychological Review 58 (1951): 213 – 223; Rosenzweig, “Freud and Experimental Psychology: The Emergence of
Idiodynamics,” in A Century of Psychology as Science, Sigmund Koch and David E. Leary, eds. (New York:
McGraw – Hill, 1985); 135 – 207; Rosenzweig, Freud, Jung, and Hall the King-Maker: The Historic Expedition to
America (1909) (Seattle: Hogrefe & Huber and St. Louis: Rana House, 1992); Rosenzweig, The Historic Expedition
to America (1909): Freud, Jung, and Hall the King-Maker, 2nd edition (St. Louis: Rana House, 1994); Rosenzweig,
“Idiodynamics,” in Encyclopedia of Psychology, Vol.2, 2nd ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994): 205 – 208.
16. See Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 182 – 203. For a comprehensive review of the literature on
word association and the related “complexes,” see Samuel C. Kohs, “The Association Method in its Relation to the
Complex and Complex Indicators,” American Journal of Psychology 25 (1914): 544 – 594. This survey begins with
Martin Trautscholdt (1883) and continues through Emil Kraepelin (1892), Gustav Aschaffenburg (1896), Max
Wertheimer and Julius Klein (1904), and C. G. Jung (1904 – 1910).
17. An excellent survey is available in C. G. Jung, Studies in Word-Association (London: Heinemann, 1918).
18. Rosenzweig, “The Place of the Individual,” 8.
19. Gordon W. Allport to Saul Rosenzweig, 30 June 1958.
20. Raymond B. Cattell, Personality: A Systematic Theoretical and Factual Study (New York: McGraw – Hill, 1950).
21. Saul Rosenzweig to Gordon W. Allport 7 October 1958.
22. R. M. Martin, Events, Reference, and Logical Form (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press,
1978). A generation earlier, there were the pioneering efforts of the theoretical biologist, J. H. Woodger, Biology
and Language: An Introduction to the Methodology of the Biological Sciences Including Medicine (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1952), and J. H. Woodger, Physics, Psychology and Medicine: A Methodological
Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956). In neurology, the methods and discoveries of Wilder Pen-
field pointed to some of the organic correlates of the registration, retention, and apperceptive recall of individual
experiences; see Wilder Penfield, The Excitable Cortex in Conscious Man (Springfield, Illinois: Thomas, 1958),
and Wilder Penfield, The Mystery of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Related developments
in cognitive psychology are exemplified by the innovative investigations in H. F. Crovitz, Galton’s Walk: Methods
for the Analysis of Thinking, Intelligence, and Creativity (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1970), H. F. Crovitz and
H. Schiffman, “Frequency of Episodic Memories as a Function of Their Age,” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society
4 (1974): 517 – 518, and D. C. Rubin, “On the Retention Function for Autobiographical Memory,” Journal of Verbal
Learning & Verbal Behavior 21 (1982): 21 – 38, on memory for autobiographical incidents.
23. See Organization of Memory, Endel Tulving and W. Donaldson, eds. (New York: Academic Press, 1972, Part 3).
24. Thus in Endel Tulving’s book, Elements of Episodic Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983):
142 – 149, the author considers the definition of “Original events” and their basic role in memory as a process.
25. See Varieties of Memory and Consciousness: Essays Presented in Honor of Endel Tulving, Henry L. Roediger,
III and Fergus I. Craik, Eds., (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989), chap. 2. The event continues to be of
focal interest in Memory Systems 1994, Daniel R. Schacter and Endel Tulving, Eds. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).
See especially the section, “Defining Memory Systems,” 13f.
26. See the following publications by S. Rosenzweig: “Norms” in Feelings and Emotions, Reymert, Ed. (New
York: McGraw – Hill, 1950) 327 – 335; Rosenzweig, “Idiodynamics in Personality Theory.” 213 – 223; “Background
to Idiodynamics,” The Clinical Psychologist 39 (1986): 83 – 89; Freud and Experimental Psychology: The Emer-
gence of Idiodynamics, 2nd rev. ed. (Rana House: St. Louis and New York: McGraw – Hill, 1986); Freud, Jung and
Hall; and “Idiodynamics,” in Encyclopedia of Psychology: 205 – 208.
27. G. W. Allport, Pattern and Growth in Personality (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961): 13 – 15.
28. Allport, Pattern and Growth, 13. Allport’s original source (without the parenthetical statements) is Personality
in Nature, Society and Culture, Clyde Kluckhohn, Henry A. Murray, and David Scheider, Eds. (New York: Alfred
Knopf, 1953): 53.
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29. G. W. Allport, Pattern and Growth.
30. Ibid, 14 – 15.
31. G. W. Allport, “The General and the Unique in Psychological Science,” Journal of Personality 30 (1962):
405 – 422.
32. Ibid., 421.
33. “Gordon W. Allport,” in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Edwin G. Boring and Gardner Lindzey,
eds. (New York: Appleton – Century Crofts, 1967): vol. 5, 3 – 25. One could argue that a reference in Gordon W.
Allport, The Person in Psychology: Selected Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 395, to an “on-moving structure
of personality” still smacked of the idiodynamic.
34. See, for example, David G. Winter, “Gordon Allport and ‘Letters from Jenny,’ ” in Fifty Years of Personality
Psychology, Kenneth H. Craik, Robert Hogan, and Raymond N. Wolfe, eds. (New York: Plenum Press, 1993): 153.
35. G. W. Allport, “Traits Revisited,” American Psychologist 21 (1966): 1 – 10. Reprinted in G. W. Allport, The
Person in Psychology: Selected Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968): 43 – 66.
36. Ibid., 49f.
37. Ibid., 62.
38. Ibid., 64.
39. G. W. Allport, Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1955): 44.
40. Allport, Pattern and Growth, 1961.
41. Duane Schultz, Theories of Personality (Monterey, Cal.: Brooks/Cole, 1976): 197.
42. Allport, Pattern and Growth, p. 229.
43. Bem P. Allen, Personality Theories (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1994): 645.
44. Allport, “My Encounters with Personality Theory,” unpublished manuscript, W. G. T. Douglas, Recorded by
and Ed. Boston University School of Theology, 1962. Cited in Alan C. Elms “Allport’s Personality and Allport’s
Personality,” in Fifty Years, Craik, Hogan, and Wolfe, eds. 39 – 55.
45. Peter A. Bertocci, The Person God Is (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1970): 67.
46. G. W. Allport, Waiting for the Lord: 33 Meditations on God and Man, Peter A. Bertocci, Ed. (New York:
Macmillan, 1978).
47. G. W. Allport, The Individual and His Religion: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Macmillan, 1950): 15.
48. Jerome Bruner, “Gordon Willard Allport: 1897 – 1967,” American Journal of Psychology 81 (1968): 279 – 284.
49. “Gordon W. Allport” in History of Psychology, vol. 5. Boring and Lindzey, eds., 4.
50. G. W. Allport, The Quest of Nellie Wise Allport (Boston: Published by author, 1944). Allport papers, Harvard
University Archives.
51. “Letters from Jenny,” (Anon). Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 41 (1946): 315 – 350; 449 – 480. A
later more complete edition appeared as a separate monograph with G. W. Allport as the acknowledged editor.
52. Winter, “Gordon Allport and ‘Letters from Jenny,’ ” 147– 163.
53. Cf. Allport, The Quest, 15.
54. Ibid., 15 – 16.
55. Ibid.
56. Cf. Ian A. M. Nicholson, “Moral Projects and Disciplinary Practices: Gordon Allport and the Development of
American Personality Psychology.” Ph.D. diss., York University, North York, Ontario, Canada, 1996, 146.
57. See Richard Cabot, Social Work: Essays on the Meeting-ground of Doctor and Social Worker (Boston:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1919); and Richard Cabot, Adventures on the Borderlands of Ethics (New York: Harper & Row,
1926).
58. Anne Roe, “A Psychological Study of Eminent Psychologists and Anthropologists, and a Comparison with Bi-
ological and Physical Scientists,” Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 67 (1953): 1 – 55.
59. Ian A. M. Nicholson, “Gordon Allport and His Religion,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Che-
iron Society, June 1994, p. 1. (unpublished, quoted by permission). The quoted letter from Allport to Anne Roe is
dated March 29, 1951.
60. Allport, The Individual and His Religion, 15.
61. G. W. Allport, “The Problem, the Mystery: Some Reflections on Theological Education,” (Matriculation Din-
ner Address) Bulletin of the Episcopal Theological School 59 (1967): 15 – 18. Allport’s brother, Floyd Allport, did
not share Gordon’s viewpoint; in his autobiography, “Floyd H. Allport,” in A History of Psychology, vol. 6, Lindzey,
Ed., 3, Floyd noted that “I must have reacted differently from Gordon to what I felt to be the rather heavy religious
influence in our early life. . . . Later when I went to college, we would have long and friendly arguments concern-
ing science and religion.” Another comparison (and rivalry) that is not pursued in the present article concerns
Gordon Allport’s relationship with Henry Murray.