Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood [Hardcover]

Ian Nicholson (Author), Ian A. M. Micholson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2003

Inventing Personality examines the early career of Gordon Allport (1897-1967) to reveal the history of the personality category he championed. Drawing on an extensive array of previously unpublished biographical materials, Nicholson masterfully combines biography with intellectual history to reveal the ways in which Allport's science was embedded in the cultural politics of America in the 1920s and the 1930s. He argues that personality's emergence as an object of science was linked to the gradual demise of character and the self-sacrificing, morally grounded self that it supported. Carefully highlighting Allport's complex commitments to both science and spirituality, Nicholson examines the rich cultural and historical contexts that framed the emergence of personality as a discipline, revealing multiple (even contradictory) meanings of "personality" in the language of American selfhood. He asserts that "personality's" appeal lay in its ability to integrate and obscure the complex polarities of material and spiritual; old and new; masculine and feminine; and freedom and control-categories rendered unstable in a new and distinctively modern age. This book will be invaluable to scholars and practitioners interested in personality, and it will serve as a model of scientific biography.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 301 pages
• Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA); 1 edition (January 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155798929X
• ISBN-13: 978-1557989291
• Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,899,741 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful study of a fascinating and important theorist, May 24, 2005

By 

Robert N. Sollod "Bob Sollod" (Shaker Heights, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood (Hardcover)

I do not have time now to write comprehensively about all the wonderful treasures I found in this book. There is the history of the industial mid-west around the turn of the last century, the intellectual climate of Harvard and Europe, especially Germany during the 1920s, also an account of an encounter between young Allport and Freud. What is revealed is the factors leading to the intellectual formation of Gordon Allport, a pre-eminent American psychologist. Unlike most others in his field, he was motivated by a deep and intense spiritual commitment. It is a great read, and should be of interest to many thoughtful people in general as well as to those psychologists, such as myself, who have been influenced by Allport's ideas.