Customer Reviews

Self-Consistency: A Theory of Personality

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This is not an "easy read," but it is a seminal work in the field of Self Psychology. Lecky takes on Freud and Pavlov, arguing that they are dependent on faulty metaphors. Lecky holds that "people can only be true to themselves. Individuals will behave in a way that is consistent with their self concept, even if this behavior is otherwise unrewarding to them"
Anyone serious about understanding the psychology of the Self should read this book--not once, but several times.

This book is a 10,000 carat diamond in the rough.

First, the rough:

Too much of it is a spot-on criticism of the flaws of Behaviorism, written at a time when being critical of Behaviorism was the surest path to professional suicide as an academic psychologist.

Much of the rest is a description of personality inventories Lecky worked on, and which have little modern relevance, and little relevance to the theories expounded in this book.

Now, the diamond:

A small sub-section of this book, perhaps the final third of it, expounds Lecky's theory of self-consistency: that one of the most basic instincts guiding learning and the formation of identity and personality is the need to form an integrated and self-consistent map of reality. And that for good reason, once this map is formed, its continuing consistency is generally more important than its accuracy.

These theories, developed in the 20s and 30s, and published in this book in 1945, presaged Leon Festinger's Cognitive Dissonance Theory by 11 years.

In essence, Cognitive Dissonance is merely a restatement of Self-Consistency Theory, and one which is much poorer for it's limited scope: where Lecky described the instinct which drives people to be internally consistent, Festinger only described people's reactions to inconsistency.

All modern research in dissonance that I've read so far has supported or been consistent with Lecky's basic theory, and I consistently find that theories and research based on Dissonance become clearer and more powerful when re-described in terms of self-consistency.

If you can find a cheap copy, I recommend this book to anybody interested in personality, dissonance theory, learning, therapy, or persuasion. As I'm writing this, though, it's $600 on Amazon. At those prices, I still recommend it to anybody actively researching dissonance.