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Readers who look at the dust jacket of the hardcover version of this book or at the back cover of the paperback will see that I praised it on reading a prepublication version. Your editor, well aware of this, still thinks it appropriate for me to review the book, and I have to agree: Just because I thought highly of it on a first scanning should not disqualify me from more through reconsideration, which has resulted in even more enthusiastic approval.
The subtitle accurately specifies the scope of the volume, and the title, Personology, identifies the book with the tradition of Henry A. Murray and the Harvard Psychological Clinic (Murray et al., 1938; White, 1966), which focused on idiographic, holistic, psychodynamic personality assessment. Its dedication to Silvan Tomkins, recently deceased, matches Tomkins's (1991) dedication of volume 3 of his Affect, Imagery, Consciousness to Irving Alexander: The Murray psychodynamic tradition is mediated through Alexander's early apprenticeship, career-long friendship, and intellectual exchange with Tomkins. Tomkins's script theory is visible, whereas the Murray scaffolding of needs and press is not, and the logic of Alexander's personological inferences, as he says, is much the same as Tomkin's application (1947) of Mill's canons of inference to Thematic Apperception Test protocols. But Alexander has internalized Tomkins's conceptual resources so securely that he employs them inobtrusively.
The book is relevant to modern psychoanalysis in two distinct ways. On one hand, it attempts, with unusual success, to systematize the principles of psychodynamic