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It has been noted by Angyal and others that psychiatry is the application of a basic science that does not as yet exist. It is of extreme interest and importance to those of us practitioners who are aware of this fact, then, to know that it is indeed today a matter of scientific concern. It is to the development of the basic science on which psychiatry may advance that Gordon W. Allport addresses himself in the twenty-ninth of the Terry Foundation Series, his essay on “Becoming.”
As Allport states in the beginning, whether it be for good or ill and whether or not we approve, the fact remains that we are in the midst of a psychological revolution and the psychological approach to things is the order of the day. But present-day psychology is not a unitary science. It is still a series of collections of facts and theories, each series of which seems oriented toward one of two polar conceptions, and none of these yet accounts for the organization and growth of the human individual. The first of the two conceptions around which current psychological thought is oriented is in the tradition of Locke. It holds that man's mind is essentially a passive mechanism, engraved by sensory data, and driven by changes in tissue condition set up either in the soma itself or arriving through the external environment. In line with this belief, this orientation also includes the notions that what is external and visible is more fundamental than what is not, that which is small and molecular is more fundamental than what is large and molar, and that what is earlier in development is more fundamental than what takes place later. The second or Leibnitzian conception, to which Allport is drawn, avers that the person is not merely a locus or collection of acts, but their source as well, and that it is in the nature of mind that it be inherently active. Allport feels that this latter view lacks an adequate theory of motivation, and he notes that in dealing with motivation, doctrines range from