Library of the History of Psychology Theories

Series Editor Robert W. Rieber Fordham University New York, NY USA

For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/6927 Eugene Taylor

The Mystery of Personality

A History of Psychodynamic Theories

123 Eugene Taylor Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center 747 Front St San Francisco, CA 94111 USA [email protected]

ISBN 978-0-387-98103-1 e-ISBN 978-0-387-98104-8 DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-98104-8 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York

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Henry A. Murray, MD, PhD (1893Ð1988) Acknowledgments

Readers, I hope, will forgive me at the outset for any inordinate focus on materi- als in the English language and particularly my focus on dynamic theories of per- sonality in the history of American psychology, although I have also referred to British and European sources and even touched lightly on the classical psycholo- gies of Asia. My formal acknowledgments are gratefully extended to Mrs. Bay James Baker, literary executor of the William James Estate, for permission to refer to unpublished material in the James papers at Harvard; to Harley Holden, director emeritus at the Harvard University Archives; and to the Trustees of the Ella Lyman Cabot Trust for allowing me to establish a stewardship over the papers of Gordon Willard Allport from 1979 to 1985, which permitted me to create an index for the files and to complete the index of correspondence begun by Mrs. Kay Bruner; to Dr. Gardner Murphy for first introducing me to Anthony Sutich back in 1969; and to Dr. Lois Murphy for the chance to assist her on her biography of her husband 20 years later; to Mrs. Geraldine Stevens, for bequeathing to me before she left Harvard the 10,000 piece combined collection she had assembled alphabetically of other authors’ reprints belonging to Edwin G. Boring, Gordon Willard Allport, and Stanley Smith Stevens; to Dr. Caroline Fish Chandler Murray for the many kind- nesses she extended to me during the years I worked for her husband, the late Henry A. Murray. Through Harry I met everyone who was still alive who had been con- nected to his era in psychology, including Erik and Joan Erikson, Sol Rosenzweig, Robert White, Sylvan Tomkins, Nevitt Sanford, and others. Acknowledgments also go to Ms. Analize Katz, former librarian in the Department of Psychology in William James Hall; she preceded Mr. Richard Kaufman, who also granted me unrestricted access to his library’s holdings; and to the late Paul Roazan for wise counsel on certain points of psychoanalytic lore. Acknowledgements also to the medical historian, John Burnham, for directing my attention to the Swiss influence on American psychology and psychiatry. I owe a particular debt to the late Henri Ellenberger for his keen support of my early work reconstructing the American scene in dynamic psychiatry, which he had so admirably chronicled from the per- spective of events in Europe; to Sonu Shamdasani, PhD, reader in Jung History at the University of London and editor of the new translations of Jung through the Phile- mon Foundation for many endnotes and editorial comments; to Richard Wolfe, then Joseph Garland Librarian in the Boston Medical Library and Archivist at Harvard

vii viii Acknowledgments

Medical School, now Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the College of Physi- cians, Philadelphia, and Elin Wolfe, co-author of the Walter B. Cannon biography, who both sheltered an errant scholar back in the beginning who had come from Divinity and then entered the history of psychiatry; their circle included Benjamin White, MD, primary author of the Stanley Cobb biography; the late Mark Altschule, MD, pathologist and historian of medicine at Harvard Medical School; and Sanford Gifford, MD, archivist of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, among others. The late Eric Carlson, MD, at Payne Whitney/New York Hospital, was an avid supporter, as was the late Ernest Hilgard. The late Rollo May was particularly helpful in clarifying points having to do with the history of existential-humanistic psychology; as were the late Anthony Sutich, and also Miles Vich, successor to Sutich as editor of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology; to Natalie Rogers, PhD, for invaluable material on her father, the late Carl Rogers, and herself, now being developed by Sue Ann Herron; and to the late Francis O. Schmitt, molecular biologist and University Professor at MIT for drawing my attention to the relation between my historical work and certain humanistic implications of the neuroscience revolution in which he participated as a founder of the Neuroscience Research Pro- gram. I am indebted also to Herbert Benson, MD, for the many hours I was able to review his work as Visiting Historian in the Mind/Body Medical Institute from 2000 to 2002. One of the greatest in my personal pantheon of intellectual mentors was my friend and confidant, the late Sheldon White. And a special tribute goes to the existential-humanistic, transpersonal, and phenomenological faculty at the original PhD program in humanistic psychology, now operating under the name of Saybrook Graduate School: among them, Maureen O’Hara, Arthur Bohart, Jeannie Achterberg, Stan Krippner, Tom Greening, David Lukoff, Alan Combs, Amedeo Giorgi, Ruth Richards, Donald Rothberg, Kirk Schneider, and others. Jim Anderson provided important materials on Henry A. Murray, while Nicole Barenbaum gra- ciously read over the chapter on personality theory at Harvard, and Teresa Iverson the chapters on Jung and Adler. Thomas J. Martinez contributed on Binzwanger. Ward Williamson assisted with the collection of sources and Susan Gordon, newly minted Saybrook PhD, peroically assisted me with the endnotes and the final draft of the manuscript, while Robert Rieber served as a series editor, of which the present volume is one of eleven, produced through the good offices of, Sharon Pan- ulla, Executive Editor at Springer. Contents

1 The Trinity of Affinity: Personality, Consciousness, and Psychotherapeutics ...... 1 The Hypothesis of the Three Streams ...... 5 Dynamic Theories of Personality and Their Histories ...... 7 The Meaning of the Word “Dynamic” ...... 10 The Conflation of Self, Ego, and Personality ...... 11 Notes...... 15 2 Charcot’s Axis ...... 19 Janet’s Case of Léonie ...... 32 The 1889 Congress of Experimental Psychology ...... 33 James on “Person and Personality” ...... 34 James on Multiple Personality in the Lectures on Exceptional Mental States ...... 36 Personality Transformation in The Varieties of Religious Experience ...... 38 Prince on Ms. Beauchamp ...... 40 FlournoyonHélèneSmith...... 40 JungonHélènePreiswerk...... 41 The Young Roberto Assagioli ...... 43 Notes...... 47 3 Freud’s Shibboleth: Psychoanalysis ...... 53 So-Called Defectors, the First Turn Toward Ego Psychology andtheDeathInstinct...... 62 Freud’s Flight ...... 69 Freud’s Influence ...... 69 Notes...... 70 4 The Freudians ...... 75 Ferenczi in Budapest ...... 76 RankandHisCircle...... 76 Anna Freud, the Devoted Daughter ...... 78 Jones in Britain ...... 78

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HerbertSilberer...... 79 Ludwig Binswanger ...... 80 James Jackson Putnam ...... 81 Abraham Arden Brill ...... 82 Karl Abraham ...... 83 Max Eitingon ...... 83 OskarPfister...... 84 Marie Bonaparte ...... 84 Lacan and Post-structuralism ...... 85 MelanieKlein...... 86 Heinz Kohut ...... 88 M.MasudR.Khan...... 88 Ego Psychology ...... 91 The Menninger Clinic ...... 93 Franz Alexander ...... 94 Notes...... 96 5 The Neo-Freudians ...... 101 The Expansion of Psychoanalysis ...... 103 Sullivan...... 104 KarenHorney...... 107 ErichFromm...... 111 ClaraThompson...... 115 RolloMay...... 117 FriedaFromm-Reichmann...... 118 ErikErikson...... 119 Notes...... 124 6 Jung and Complex Psychology ...... 127 Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious ...... 131 Psychological Types ...... 135 The Architecture of the Psyche ...... 138 HisWorkonChristianSymbolism...... 142 The Diffusion of Jung’s Ideas ...... 144 Jung’s Immediate Circle ...... 145 Eisendrath’s Three Schools ...... 147 CurrentStatus...... 148 Notes...... 150 7 Adler’s Menschenkenntnis ...... 155 TheCaseofFritz...... 160 Adler’s Influence ...... 163 The Ansbachers ...... 166 MayandAdler...... 167 AdlerandMaslow...... 168 Adler’s Influence on Victor Frankl ...... 169 Logotherapy ...... 174 Notes...... 176 Contents xi

8 Psychodynamics, Gestalt Psychology, and Personality Theory at Harvard ...... 179 HenryA.Murray...... 186 StanleyCobb...... 190 Boring and Psychoanalysis ...... 193 The Macropersonality Theorists ...... 195 Ross Stagner and The Murphys ...... 201 Gardner and Lois Murphy ...... 203 OnMeetingGordonAllport...... 204 MurphyandLewin...... 205 The Princeton Conference on Personality and Gestalt Psychology . . 205 LewinatHarvard...... 209 Boring Performs a Commissurotomy on Psychology ...... 211 Endnotes ...... 218 9 Anthropologists, Gestaltists, Jungians, and the Pastoral Theologians of New York ...... 223 The New School for Social Research ...... 226 The Gestaltists ...... 226 KurtGoldstein...... 228 The Jungians ...... 231 Edward Christopher Whitmont ...... 232 Joseph Campbell ...... 233 Tillich at Union and Columbia ...... 235 Abraham Maslow ...... 240 WernerWolff...... 244 Gardner and Lois Murphy in New York ...... 246 Gardner Murphy’s Biosocial Approach ...... 247 Notes...... 254 10 An Existential-Humanistic and Transpersonally Oriented Depth Psychology ...... 261 Laura Perls and Natalie Rogers ...... 289 Transpersonal Psychology ...... 291 Maslow on Transcendence ...... 292 Their Methods of Research ...... 301 Their Model of Consciousness ...... 303 Their Approach to Indigenous Psychologies ...... 304 Notes...... 308 11 Neuroscience and the Future of the Self ...... 315 The Fate of Classical Personality Theories ...... 316 The Self in Psychiatry ...... 320 Turkle on the Second Self ...... 322 UlrichNeiserandtheCognitiveSelf...... 323 Seligman’s Positive Psychology ...... 324 Genomics ...... 326 xii Contents

Neurophenomenology, Embodiment, and Experience ...... 326 Intersubjectivity...... 330 The Phenomenology of the Science-Making Process Itself ...... 333 RevelationoftheEpistemologicalWorldviewoftheScientist..... 334 Notes...... 335 12 Epilogue ...... 339 Indigenous Non-Western Conceptions of Personality ...... 343 The Growth-Oriented Dimension of Personality ...... 344 The Uniqueness of Each Person ...... 346 Psychology as Epistemology ...... 348 Notes...... 349 Bibliography ...... 351 Index ...... 381 Chapter 1 The Trinity of Affinity: Personality, Consciousness, and Psychotherapeutics

One could say that three of the most dreaded plagues in the history of scientific psychology have been conceptions of personality, models of the unconscious, and systems of psychotherapy. They have proven more than a mere inconvenience; they have encroached so much into the domain of the orderly, the logical, and the rational that to the experimentalist they have come to represent a veritable disease. Worse, all three converge in what has come to be referred to as dynamic theories of personal- ity. If the experimentalists actually believe that such concepts even refer to anything real, which most of them do not, the history of such theories has been the perpetual bane of scientific psychology because they represent domains of human experience that are not readily amenable to precise measurement, prediction, and control. Yet, they not only refuse to go away but also have tended to dominate the definition of psychology in popular culture, condemning scientific psychology to the oblivion of the specialized peer reviewed journals and the university laboratories, reductionistic science being perceived as generally tackling insignificant problems with impecca- ble methods. Dynamic theories of personality have always encroached on the experimental sci- ences in a variety of ways. Random examples include Freud’s insistence that psy- choanalysis was a science independent of neurology, psychiatry, and psychology; Jung’s word association experiments around 1900, which were believed to mea- sure unconscious complexes; Wolfgang Pauli’s application of Jung’s theory of the archetypes to problems in quantum physics in the 1920s; the experimental analysis of psychoanalytic concepts in the 1930s; the experimental depth psychology of the gestaltist, Werner Wolff, or the attempted fusion of learning theory and psychoanal- ysis in the 1950s; or the effort today to fuse psychoanalysis with neural Darwin- ism. One could say the scientistÐpractitioner model, the so-called Boulder model, is another preeminent example, except that even there the reductionistic epistemology that has gripped psychology for the past 100 years has always been promoted as the primary and more important orienting attitude underlying clinical practice. Thus, historians of psychology have placed dynamic theories of personality as a minor and relatively unintegrated idiom in the history of mainstream psychology, a scientific discipline, despite the fact that psychotherapy, its most visible product, is probably the primary activity of most psychologists and psychiatrists as those disciplines are defined in the West.

E. Taylor, The Mystery of Personality, Library of the History of Psychology Theories, 1 DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-98104-8_1, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009 2 1 The Trinity of Affinity

To understand this conundrum, in its broadest and most eclectic sense, psychol- ogy must be considered both an art and a science, instead of the present situation where reductionistic science is elevated to an undeserved status as the ideal, while the interior phenomenological life of the person, the domain of meaning, and the problem of the personal equation in science, which are preeminently problems of psychology, are completely ignored. Historically and epistemologically, psychol- ogy is defined as having its roots as an academic discipline in the methods of the natural sciences, while it remains situated within the social sciences. But practically, in the clinic, where the therapist must deal with the mystery of the person in front of them and adapt the data of research wherever feasible to the more pragmatic cri- teria of what works, here, psychology becomes more an art, dominated by intuitive norms that may or may not be informed by reductionistic science. From a scientific standpoint, however, for this reason the academy and the clinic are not considered equal. Following the German metaphor of hard science, what the clinician calls an art, which is actually an endeavor in its own right, the academic refers to somewhat pejoratively as applied science, that is, a lower order subsidiary of the so-called empirical and measurement-oriented sciences. Ideally, the scientific myth goes, nothing is allowed in the clinic that was not first verified in the laboratory. It is a dictum that remains largely unspoken, since it rarely ever happens in reality, yet it is at the root of the unity in science movement among the experimentalists who control theory building and who find psychology always so untidy; it can be seen in new trends toward evidence-based practice, and it is the implied epistemology behind the construction of the licensure exams and insurance re-imbursement for clinicians. Thus, psychology exists as a discipline defined by a split between its experimen- tal and clinical traditions. Some experts still believe that it is an integrated science to the extent that the clinical subsumes itself under the experimental, so that the field is united by a single reductionistic epistemology. Others see the experimen- tal and clinical traditions as separate lineages, each with their own famous figures, methods, and epistemologies that define personality and consciousness in radically different ways. However, the attempt by individuals to fathom their own personal reality and formulate an adaptive language of self and others to their experience must be con- sidered yet a third venue defining psychology. Curiously, experimentalists reject this view that defines psychology as self-knowledge in favor of defining psychology as a science, the purpose of which is the manipulation, prediction, and control of behavior. Scientists believe that only they deal with the real and that they have no metaphysics. They think that first person accounts of personal experience are like unreliable hallucinations. Meanwhile, every system of thought, including reduction- istic science, has metaphysical underpinnings. Yet the reductionists claim that only they possess the superior source of knowledge. As a result, dynamic theories of per- sonality have made little incursion into the experimentalists’ venue. This also means that Freud never really had the impact on psychology and psychiatry that people think that he had, where the core of these endeavors is defined in both disciplines as laboratory-oriented research. 1 The Trinity of Affinity 3

Meanwhile, dynamic theories of personality have tended to dominate clinical practice, except that, there, historically, the emphasis has been largely on psy- chopathology. Clinical psychology does endeavor to achieve as its outcome a healthy, functioning organism that is at least capable of some kind of adjustment to the environment. After all, successful therapy, Freud once said, was the ability to love and to work. Clinicians hope for a person with enough sense to adapt to one’s cultural norms, to be considerate of the experience of others, and to be able to live with one’s own thoughts and feelings. Here, we presume the patient can develop the ability to analyze their own experience and make adaptive adjustments for them- selves if therapy is successful. But this is usually not the stated goal of most clin- icians who engage in psychotherapeutic practice, only an implied ideal. Cognitive psychologists, for instance, have no global picture of health—that is too unscien- tific, so they are confined to fighting for the re-education of a patient’s abnormal thinking one thought at a time. While even attitudes and values are studied using the methods of scientific research, almost nothing is said in Western psychology about the cultivation of a language of self-knowledge. An exception is the deprecating tone of a few cognitive neuropsychologists who think that the language of folk psychology will soon be replaced by their own allegedly superior scientific theories. There is a lineage in the field of personality theory, however, the existential-humanistic and transpersonal, almost always omitted from the history of personality theory as a field, which holds that common sense can sometimes be developed into a highly intuitive capacity, such that one’s perception of self and others may become more highly evolved and personal consciousness can be transformed into something higher, deeper, and more discerning. Historically, we have said, experimental psychology rejects such claims, assert- ing that, with regard to self-knowledge, no such so-called higher capacities are possible. Critics of the experimentalists’ viewpoint maintain that experimental psy- chology is constrained by its methods, which are based exclusively on the rational ordering of sense data alone, such that, if phenomena cannot be measured, then they cannot be studied. Perforce, it is not too great a leap for the rationalist to presume that, if it cannot be studied, it must not exist. William James called this kind of con- fusion the “psychologists’ fallacy”—the tendency for the psychologist to confuse his own state of mind for that of the subject’s that he studies. No better example of this attitude can be found than with the subject of the unconscious. From the beginning, the so-called experimental attitude in mainstream psychology has always rejected the construct of the unconscious as unscientific. Lightner Witmer, for instance, rejected it in the 1890s, John Watson rejected it in 1913, and Skinner rejected it in the 1930s. Meanwhile, erstwhile psychologists tried valiantly to answer this objection, mainly in the field of personality psychology. The experimentalists’ answer to the alleged reality of the unconscious throughout the history of modern psychology has been to retreat into evermore reductionistic methods with the development of trait theory. While character development still dominated psychology during the era of World War I, the psychology of individual differences had already emerged in the late 19th century with the early measurement 4 1 The Trinity of Affinity of intelligence. The measurement of traits began in earnest in the 1920s, a decade of rapid advances in both mental testing and statistical analysis. A glut of nomo- thetic studies that involved the sampling of large populations on a single variable, characterized the era of the 1930s, while the encroachment of reductionistic meth- ods in experimental psychology into personality research during and after World War II, especially with regard to personnel selection and training, further magnified the emphasis on traits into the 1950s. Attribution theory, learned helplessness, and a plethora of tests, from the MyersÐBriggs to the MMPI, are all variations on trait the- ory. Today, we have the five factor theory, which the more experimentally minded have tried to make the whole of the subject of personality psychology, its nearest competitor being the eight factor theory. Psychiatry, on the other hand, has been more forgiving, likely from its more nat- uralistic roots in bedside medicine, and the recognition of individual differences in the biological structure and function of each organism. Psychiatry does derive its experimental methods historically as much from experimental psychology as it does its epistemology from general science, but biological psychiatry and psychophar- macology have tended to dominate academic psychiatry in the medical schools, while dynamic theories of the unconscious have tended to prevail in clinical set- tings up until the modern period of managed care, Prozac, Viagra, and cognitive behaviorism. This has produced a situation in which psychotherapy, possibly considered the least scientific of practices, is probably the largest common denominator in both clinical psychology and clinical psychiatry. The recent trend has been toward an emphasis on short-term intensive forms of therapy and the almost complete disappearance of long-term analysis. Meanwhile, when psychiatrists who prac- tice psychotherapy get together in professional meetings they tend to talk about the brain, while clinical psychologists tend to confine their mutual public dis- cussions to the experimental data available on cognitive thought and behavioral control. In other words, there is sometimes a vast discrepancy between what psychologists and psychiatrists do and what they say regarding dynamic the- ories of the unconscious, some being more transparent than others, based on the criteria of what constitutes legitimate science. Psychoanalysis, for instance, once touted as an independent science, has now evolved into psychoanalytically assisted psychotherapy. Moreover, in the new era of neuroscience, theories of the unconscious are no longer a primary topic of discussion. They are consid- ered outmoded or have been absorbed into mechanical models of what is on the screen and the unseen software behind that drives all activity on the computer’s desktop. Reviewing the history of psychology, it is evident that the experimentalists’ claim that there is only one legitimate definition of psychology, their own, under which all other variations must be subsumed, is a model that continues to dominate the academy. This attitude has produced a contemporary psychology that is allegedly patterned after the natural sciences, but that must ignore large domains of human experience that cannot be approached by psychology’s contemporary adherence to an outmoded definition of 19th-century Newtonian thinking.