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It has been a contention of this reviewer for some time that we psychoanalysts and other clinical therapists tend to overlook the overwhelming amount of work which psychologists, anthropologists, and others do in studying human behavior and personality. As a result, our knowledge of man in all his affective aspects may tend to become somewhat one-sided. We observe “pathological” alterations in character structure without stopping to ask “What is being done in the field of normal personality?”
An answer to this question is supplied by Gardner Murphy's ambitious work entitled Personality. This book is remarkable for a number of reasons. For one thing, there is its tremendous size and scope, the latter touching upon and borrowing from practically all of the sciences which include man as an object of inquiry. Then again, despite its size and rich variability, it is cohesive and unified. Throughout it, runs the theme of the evaluation of personality as occurring in three stages: (1) a level of global, undifferentiated mass activity; (2) a level of differentiated parts, each acting more or less autonomously; (3) a level of integrated action based upon interdependence of the parts.
The method Murphy uses in presenting his concept of personality is the “staircase” technique of proceeding from the simple to the complex. The first part of the book therefore discusses the biological origins of personality with considerable effort devoted to explaining that the controversy between “heredity and environment” is an essentially needless one which does damage to our inquiry into the nature of human growth. Subsequent sections of the book are devoted to problems of learning, perception, culminating finally in investigations into problems of the self, considerations of “wholeness” and the reciprocal relationships existing between the individual and his culture.
The portions of the work which are of interest to us as psychoanalysts with our particular orientation toward the impact of int