The Study of Lives

The Study of Lives reveals for the first time the extent of Henry A. Murray's considerable influence on the study of personality. Throughout his long and distinguished career, he has either trained or strongly influenced some of the world's leading psychologists, eighteen of whom have written fascinating essays for this book. The range of topics presented here is as diverse and highly original as Murray's own ideas about personality. Everyone concerned with the study of personality will find this book an excellent sampling of the best work being done in the field. "The study of lives" is a phrase Henry A. Murray has often used to describe his own work, and it suggests his central conviction that living beings must be studied as living wholes. Personality, he has repeatedly pointed out, is a dynamic process-a constantly changing configuration of thoughts, feelings, and actions occurring in a social environment and continuing throughout life. If small parts and short segments of human affairs have to be isolated for detailed scrutiny, they must still be understood as parts of a patterned organic system and as segments of a lifelong process. This has never meant for him that all research should take the form of collecting life histories, although his contributions along this line have been outstanding. It implies simply that isolating, fragmenting, and learning just a tiny bit about a lot of people tend to carry us away from what is most worth studying. The essays in this book are grouped under headings that represent some of Murray's strongest interests: His conception of personality as a dynamic process is reflected in Part I, which deals with continuities and changes in the course of life. His interest in devising procedures suitable for disclosing live feelings, fantasies, and adaptations and his insistence on the necessity for an adequate taxonomy of carefully discriminated, carefully defined variables are represented in the papers of Part II. His view that creativity is a central property of human nature has contributed to the reflections and researches that make up Part III. Finally, his concern with values--the great blind spot of traditional science but so obviously a momentous problem for contemporary lives and societies--has been taken up in several different ways by the authors of Part IV.

Robert W. White took his Ph.D. at Harvard and has taught there for twenty-five years, serving at various times as director of the Psychological Clinic and chairman of the Department of Social Relations. His present title is professor of clinical psychology.

I. GROWTH AND CHANGE IN PERSONALITY 1: The Freeing and Acting out of Impulse in Late Adolescence: Evidence from Two Cases 2: Inburn: An American Ishmael 3: Sense of Interpersonal Competence: Two Case Studies and Some Reflections on Origins 4: The Harlequin Complex II. PROCEDURES AND VARIABLES FOR STUDYING PERSONALITY 5: The Method of Self-Confrontation 6: Somerset Maugham: A Thematic Analysis of Ten Short Stories 7: Psychodynamic and Sociocultural Factors Related to Intolerance of Ambiguity 8: The Coping Functions of the Ego Mechanisms 9 : Orientations toward Death : A Vital Aspect of the Study of Lives III. CREATIVE PROCESSES IN PERSONALITY 10: Diffusion, Integration, and Enduring Attention in the Creative Process 11: Creativity and Images of the Self 12: Explorations in Typology 13: The Reconstruction of the Individual and of the Collective Past IV. VALUES IN PERSONALITY 14: Personal Values in the Study of Lives 15: Albert Camus: Personality as Creative Struggle 16: Two Influences on Freud's Scientific Thought: A Fragment of Intellectual Biography 17: Left and Right : A Basic Dimension of Ideology and Personality 18: The Golden Rule and the Cycle of Life BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HENRY A. MURRAY

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