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Gardner Murphy: Integrating, Expanding and Humanizing Psychology

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For something like thirty years -- roughly from 1930 to 1960 -- an influential group of academic psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists spread the cheerful gospel of a new social science: the human animal is infinitely perfectible, or almost so; the road ahead is illumined by a number of advanced teachings: psychoanalysis, progressive education, political liberalism. Among the luminaries in this group were Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Erik Erikson, Lawrence Frank, Helen and Robert Lynd, Ruth Munroe. And then there was Gardner Murphy, a friend of all these, who in his great book "Personality" (1947) synthesized the teachings of this group.

The present volume by his widow, the late Lois Barclay Murphy, herself a distinguished psychologist, tells the story of Gardner Murphy's life and friends. It will be of interest to all who are curious about these men an women who so profoundly influenced social science in those decades.

I was a student of Gardner Murphy at New York's City College in the early 1950's, and I appreciate the extravagant praise that his widow heaps upon his teaching prowess. When I walked into Murphy's lectures, I entered a world of no-nonsense intellectual discourse. We young undergraduates were barely adult, but Murphy treated us with a respect due to fellow intellectuals. Those of us who rose to the occasion were rewarded with an education that remains unforgettable.

It is now more than fifty years later, and upon reviewing Murphy's written work of those years, it is pleasant to note that, with all the naivete of his group, Murphy was no man's fool. He accepted most of the doctrines of his day -- the presumed power of the Rorschach test, to give but one example -- but he was never as uncritical as some of his friends. He was also curiously drawn to "psychic" phenomena as a field of investigation, but unlike others similarly afflicted, he was critical and cautious in his approach.

Lois Murphy's volume was published in 1990. She was then eighty-eight years of age, and Gardner had by then been eleven years dead. The book contains many details of historical interest, and I am glad to own it. But it is totally uncritical, not only of Gardner, but of the group of social scientists to which he belonged. It is in many ways more of a eulogy than a biography. When the book was published, the cracks in the doctrines of this group had already become apparent. Derek Freeman's trenchant criticism of Margaret Mead's work had appeared in 1983, and Lee Cronbach's critique of the Rorschach test as early as 1955.

Gardner Murphy's life and work gives us the opportunity to examine the strengths and weaknesses of his generation of social scientists. This book does not rise to this challenge.