Gordon Allport becoming a person to read. Becoming a Personality (Allport Gordon). The formation of personality. Selected writings

Gordon Willard Allport - American psychologist, personality trait theorist. Born November 11, 1897 in Montezuma, Indiana, the youngest of four brothers.

WITH early age Allport was a capable child; he characterized himself as a socially isolated individual, especially successful in literature and poorly prepared physically. At the insistence of his older brother Floyd, who was then a graduate student in psychology at Harvard University, he enters after graduation from the same university.

Although Allport took several courses in psychology at Harvard, he still majored in economics and philosophy. During his senior years, he participated in the development of a number of volunteer service projects.

In 1922, Allport received his doctorate in psychology. His dissertation on personality traits was the first study of its kind to be done in the United States. Over the next two years, Allport worked research work at the Universities of Berlin and Hamburg in Germany and at Cambridge in England. After returning from Europe, he worked for two years as a lecturer at Harvard University in the Department of Social Ethics. Here he taught the course "Personality: its psychological and social aspects". It was the first course in personality psychology in the United States.

In 1926, Allport took up a post as assistant professor of psychology at Dartmouth College, where he remained until 1930. Then he received an invitation from Harvard to work in the same position at the faculty. social relations. In 1942 he was awarded the title of professor of psychology, and until his death in 1967 he continued to hold this post. During his long illustrious career at Harvard, Allport influenced generations of students with his popular lecture course. He also received recognition as "the elder of American scientific research on personality problems."

He was elected president of the American Psychological Association (1939), president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, received the "Outstanding Contribution to Science" award (1964) and many other awards.

Allport was a prolific author. His well-known publications include Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (1937); "Man and his Religion" (1950); "Becoming: the main provisions of the psychology of personality" (1955); "Personality and social conflicts"(1960); "Style and Personal Development" (1961) and "Jenny's Letters" (1965). He is also the co-author of two widely used personality tests: A-S reactions"(together with f. H. Allport, 1928) and "The Study of Values" (with P. E. Vernon, 1931; revised by G. Lindsay in 1951 and again in 1960). His autobiography is presented in Volume 5 of The History of Psychology in Autobiographies.

In any science, among outstanding scientists one can meet representatives of two main types - "discoverers" and "systematizers". The former discover a new explanatory principle and restructure their field of knowledge in accordance with it. They see reality through the prism of their ideas, they are in danger of bias, one-sidedness, but it is they who provide breakthroughs in science and create scientific schools who develop further the doctrine founded by them. The latter, as a rule, have encyclopedic knowledge, which allows them, without introducing new explanatory principles, to systematize and generalize existing knowledge, build general theoretical systems and “make ends meet”. They, of course, also make discoveries, although more private ones. They have students, but no schools, because the school is formed around a bright idea, and not around a system. However, they enjoy great prestige because the ability to integrate different ideas into a system is even rarer than the ability to discover something fundamentally new. There are many examples: the discoverer Plato and the systematizer Aristotle, the discoverer Kant and the systematizer Hegel, the discoverer A.N. Leontiev and the systematizer S.L. Rubinshtein. These two types of scientists complement each other; if one or the other did not exist, science could hardly develop.

Scientists of both types differ in their personal characteristics. To become a "discoverer" you need talent, passion, conviction, work, courage. “Systematizers” are people gifted in a different way: this requires, first of all, intelligence, a broad outlook, erudition, a calmer scientific temperament, which helps rather not to defend one’s own, but to connect different points vision. It requires sincere interest and respect for someone else's position, an objectivity rare even for people of science, which allows them to prefer someone else's, more correct, high degree of scientific humility to their point of view. Finally, there must be professional taste - a flair that allows one to discern through the rubble of traditions and the veil of fashion the sprouts of ideas and approaches to which the future of science belongs. And the nobility, manifested in the disinterested support of these ideas and approaches with all the power of their scientific authority.

He was often called an eclecticist, and he agreed with this, specifying that Goethe distinguished between two types of eclecticism: eclecticism, like a jackdaw, which drags into its nest everything that it comes across, and systematic eclecticism, based on the desire to build a single whole from what can be found in various places. Eclecticism of the second type is not a vice, but a very productive method of scientific work 1
Cit. By: Evans R.I. Gordon Allport: The man and his ideas. N.Y.: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1970. P.19.

And rewrote it a quarter of a century later 3
Allport G.W. Pattern and growth in personality. N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961.

Legalized the introduction to academic science qualitative methods, such research problems as personal maturity, worldview, self-realization, religiosity. He did not make discoveries, did not provide breakthroughs, did not create a school, did not lay a new paradigm, but in many respects it is he who has the merit of creating personality psychology as a special subject area - it can be called the architect of personality psychology without exaggeration. During his life he was awarded all sorts of honors - he was elected president of the American Psychological Association (1939), president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, received the award "For Outstanding Contribution to Science" (1964), etc., but in his autobiography he admitted that among the many The most valuable prize for him was a two-volume collection of works of 55 of his former graduate students presented to him in 1963 with the inscription "from your students - with gratitude for your respect for our individuality." His students are characterized by such distinctive features as the presence of their own position, a holistic approach to the person and scientific non-conformity - otherwise they are very different. Among them are such remarkable psychologists as Leo Postman, Philip Vernon, Robert White, Brewster Smith, Gardner Lindsay, Jerome Bruner and others.

But Allport is great not only because he raised a galaxy of his students, but also because he was able to evaluate many advanced ideas of others, in particular, foreign scientists and provide them with significant support in advancing to the American "scientific market", which is generally extremely biased. applies to everything non-American. In the list of his publications, a huge place is occupied by reviews and prefaces to other people's books. This educational activities was characteristic of Allport all his life - starting from a young age, when, returning home after a two-year stay in Europe, he began to actively enrich American science with the ideas of W. Stern's personology, the psychology of the spirit of E. Spranger and the Gestalt psychology of K. Koffka, W. Köhler and M Wertheimer. In his adult years, he actively supported the pioneering research of Kurt Lewin, who immigrated to America. In old age, he was able to appreciate the importance of the ideas of existentialism for psychology, introduced the still unknown Viktor Frankl to the American public and supported the creation of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, although he himself did not enter into any of its structures. A survey of clinical psychologists in the United States in the 1950s found that Allport was second only to Freud in his ideological and theoretical influence.

Nor was he a purely armchair thinker. Another one distinguishing feature Allport's scientific style is to always be at the forefront of the social problems of our time. He strove to study first of all what is more important, and not what is simpler. He created articles and books, milestones for many specific areas and areas of research - the psychology of expressive movements, the psychology of radio, the psychology of rumors, the psychology of war, the psychology of religion. His 600-page work on the nature of prejudice 4
Allport G.W. The nature of prejudice. Cambridge (Mass.): Addison-Wesley, 1954.

For almost half a century, it has remained the main and unsurpassed source on this problem, and its relevance is growing, unfortunately, every year. The total circulation of this book by 1970 had reached half a million copies.

* * *

Gordon Allport's autobiography is included in this volume. Therefore, there is no need to retell it in detail. life path, which, however, is quite simple and straightforward - this is the path of an excellent student in good sense words, consistently applying his outstanding intellect and diligence to achieve goals and naturally achieve them.

Gordon Allport was born in 1897 into a family of provincial American intellectuals. He is a year younger than Piaget and Vygotsky, seven years younger than Levin, three years older than Fromm, five years older than A. R. Luria and P. Ya. Galperin, and six years older than A. N. Leontiev. He graduated from school second in academic achievement out of 100 graduates and entered the famous Harvard University - in the footsteps of his older brother Floyd, who later left a very noticeable mark on social psychology and psychology of perception.

At Harvard, Gordon Allport's intellectual abilities unfolded into full force and got direction. In parallel with psychology, he is engaged in social ethics - with young years his interest was divided between psychology and the wider social context, and it is no coincidence that in the 1930s he created an inherently interdisciplinary department of social relations at Harvard, synthesizing the approaches of psychology, sociology and anthropology.

A distinctive feature of Allport's scientific outlook was the rather great influence of European psychology, especially William Stern, Eduard Spranger and Gestalt psychology. This was largely facilitated by the young scientist's stay in Europe in the early 1920s; although most textbooks pay attention only to Allport's meeting with Freud, there was no conversation between them. Allport was open to a variety of influences, but his powerful intellect allowed him to process them and go his own way.

Under the influence of European ideas, Allport, having taken up the study of personality psychology in the 1920s, first of all personality traits and expressive movements, quickly came to the need to consider the whole personality, and not its fragments. At the university, he was taught in the behavioral tradition, in the spirit of the scheme S-O-R, Where O is an organism that mediates the connection between a stimulus S and reaction R. In fact, says Allport, we find a small S and small R but very, very large O5
Cit. By: Evans R. I. Gordon Allport: The man and his ideas. N. Y.: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1970. P. 14.

Nevertheless, Allport was the first in world psychology to build a coherent theoretical edifice. scientific psychology personality. His book Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, published in 1937, began much of the academic psychology of personality. Personality, according to Allport, is "the dynamic organization of the psychophysical systems of the individual, which determines the unique adaptation of the individual to his environment" 7
Allport G.W. Personality: A psychological interpretation. N.Y.: Holt, 1937. P. 48.

It is interesting that he reproduces almost the same definition 24 years later, only excluding from it (which, however, is very significant) the concept of adaptation: “Personality is a dynamic organization of the psychophysical systems of an individual, which determines his characteristic behavior and thinking” 8
Allport G.W. Pattern and growth in personality. N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961.

Personality and character are, in fact, one and the same, only character is a concept that is evaluatively loaded, and personality is the same, devoid of evaluation. 9
Allport G.W. Personality: A psychological interpretation. N.Y.: Holt, 1937. P. 52.

All psychology, and above all practical, still continues to varying degrees to rush between these two poles. On the one hand, the uniqueness of each person is difficult to deny, on the other hand, general patterns are a prerequisite for the application of some methods, techniques, principles. This problem is especially acute in counseling and psychotherapy, in particular, in the form of a dilemma: to rely on methods and techniques, or to work without relying on them, with the personality of the psychotherapist as his main “tool”.

Allport was the first to subject the problem of the general and the individual in personality to a detailed methodological reflection. In the spirit of the "systematic eclecticism" position, he finds the dilemma "nomothetic - idiographic" unnecessarily pointed; truth in their combination and synthesis. Allport stressed that we should not forget that each person is unique, but this does not mean that it is impossible to find something in common in people. " general law may be a law that tells how uniqueness is exercised" 11
Ibidem. P. 194.

The law of uniqueness is the basic law of personality psychology.

The most complete expression of the individual uniqueness of an individual is the sphere of his expressive, or expressive, manifestations, in relation to which Allport uses the concept of style. “Only by style do we recognize Chopin's music, Dali's paintings, and Aunt Sally's macaroni” (Now ed., p. 440). Allport paid great attention to this area of research since the late 1920s. The experimental data he cites indicate that the subjects manage to surprisingly successfully identify different forms of expressive manifestations - handwriting, gait, face, etc., belonging to the same people, although the mechanisms of this stylistic unity of individuality remain poorly understood. A person most of all manifests himself as an individuality not in what he does, but in how.

Activity and functional autonomy of motives. The fundamental feature of the personality - and here Allport was also practically the first to put this at the forefront - is its activity, proactivity, as he calls it, as opposed to the postulate of reactivity, on which all behaviorism is built. Allport categorically disagrees with the opinion of the majority of psychologists who attribute to man the desire for homeostasis, the reduction of stress. For him, a person is a creature striving to establish and maintain a certain level of tension, and the desire to reduce tension is a sign of ill health. His personality theory open system(see this ed., pp. 62–74) is a new stage in the development of these ideas.

Perhaps the most striking expression of Allport's understanding of personality as active is the principle of functional autonomy of motives he introduced.

At the time when Allport put forward this idea, the monopoly on the explanation of motivation actually belonged to psychoanalysis, which proceeded from the fact that everything is in the past - including the future. To understand motivation, you need to “dig” the history of a person: the deeper you dig into what happened to a person in the past, the easier it is to understand what is ahead of him.

In “The Trend in Motivation Theory” (see this ed., pp. 93–104), Allport talks about the emerging bias towards indirect methods of diagnosing motivation, based on a basic distrust of what a person himself knows about his motivation. Why not ask a person directly about his motives before "digging" deep? This looks a bit naive at first glance. Allport begins to analyze the situation in more detail, relying on experimental data, and formulates, on the basis of this analysis, the requirements for what the theory of psychodynamics, that is, motivation, should be. He states that, according to a number of studies, projective methods, firstly, do not reflect some of the motives that are clearly and reliably present in a person. Secondly, in people who are healthy, without severe problems, there is a good agreement between the data obtained on the basis of direct and indirect methods of motivation analysis. Their projective methods add little to their direct self-report. In people with personality conflicts, there is a discrepancy between the direct and projective pictures. Their projective methods really make it possible to reveal those motives that are not directly captured. But unless we use methods of direct self-report, says Allport, we will not be able to determine whether we are dealing with motives that are accepted, realized and integrated into the structure of the personality, or with repressed infantile fixations that exert their influence in an implicit way, giving rise to conflicts in personal structure. In these two cases, we have motives that are completely different in origin and characteristics of influence on the personality, but it is impossible to distinguish between these cases without referring to reflective consciousness. It is necessary to combine both sources of information - only then will we have a complete picture.

Allport does not argue with the psychoanalytic view of the roots of human motivation, but introduces a fundamental addition. In the process of development, the initial libidinal energies are transformed, different motives are formed, albeit from the same roots. Some motives arise from others, bud off, separate from them (this happens through their differentiation and integration, which are the two main vectors of personality development) and become functionally autonomous, that is, independent of the original basic motives.

The idea of functional autonomy of motives is itself very simple. It explains why adults have a fairly wide and varied range of motives, despite the fact that the basic initial biological needs are the same; it removes this contradiction and avoids the reduction of the entire motivation of an adult, a mature personality, to the same limited sets of needs. Motivation is always localized in the present and directed not to the past, but to the future, because it is already functionally independent of the past. Therefore, it is of little use to “dig” the past, says Allport with his usual causticity, otherwise it turns out that psychologists and the people they study look in opposite directions: people forward, and psychologists back. Isn't it time for psychologists to turn around? 12
Cm.: Allport G. W. Becoming: basic considerations for the psychology of personality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. Present. ed. pp. 166–216.

The structure of personality. The concept of hell. Emphasizing the individual uniqueness of an individual does not prevent Allport from seriously raising the question of its structural organization: “success psychological science, like the success of any science, largely depends on its ability to identify the essential units that make up this particular clot of the cosmos” (present ed., p. 354). Analyzing different approaches to the allocation of such units (see this edition, pp. 46-61, 354-369), Allport dwells on the concept of features, or dispositions. He did not invent or introduce the concept of traits into psychology, but he was the first to build a generalizing theory and methodology for studying them, gave an explanation of what it is, and his theory is still referred to in textbooks as a dispositional theory of personality. Although Allport was a broad-minded author, far from rigid mechanical and simplified constructions, nevertheless, the concept of personality traits is associated in today's psychology primarily with his name. There was a semi-joking definition in the 1920s that traits are what trait questionnaires measure. Indeed, the concept of traits arose from a measurement procedure, but it was Allport who was able to fill it with real theoretical content and turn the meager definition of a trait as something extracted from questionnaires into a full-blooded scientific psychological concept. At the same time, Allport himself stated unequivocally: “The measurement of different traits was related to the content of my doctoral dissertation, so I got involved in it quite early. But to slap the "psychology of hell" label on my subsequent scientific work means not understanding it. 13
Cit. By: Evans R. I. Gordon Allport: The man and his ideas. N. Y.: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1970. P. 24.

For Allport, a trait is not just a statistically fixed pattern, a statement of observed behavior, but a certain neuropsychological system specific to a given individual. A trait, at its most superficial, is a predisposition to behave in similar ways in different (but not all) situations. The two aspects of this stability of behavior are stability over time and stability with respect to different situations. Of course, there are situations when we behave differently than usual, but those situations in which the behavior is similar may not be exactly the same. If a person shows the same features (for example, anxiety) every time in an exam, but outside the exam situation these behavioral features are absent, his anxiety cannot, strictly speaking, be considered a personality trait. The latter manifest themselves in a wide range of situations, and not just in one area. Here is an example that Allport gives: if a person is inherently timid, then he will remain calm and restrained in the street, and in the store, and in a taxi, and in the audience, and anywhere. If he is basically friendly, then he will be friendly always and with everyone. The fact that actions, or even habits, are not consistent with certain traits does not mean that these traits do not exist. Thus, a very pedantic, punctual and collected person can become nervous and careless when he misses the train. Further, traits are not independent of each other. There is a correlation between distinctly different features that do not match. As an example, Allport cites consistently observed correlations between intelligence and a sense of humor - it is clear that these are not the same thing, but the correlations are theoretically quite explainable.

Traits transform many different stimuli into a certain set of responses. Different sets of traits transform the same stimuli into different responses and vice versa: traits simplify everything, allow you to respond in the same way to different stimuli. Allport illustrates this effect with a personality trait such as fear of communism. In America in the 1950s, the fear of communist aggression reigned, and the attitude towards communism was transferred to a lot. One category of incentives that people with this trait primarily respond to are communists, the books of Marx, neighbors - blacks and Jews, emigrants, intellectuals and liberals, left-wing organizations ... From the communists themselves comes the gradual generalization of everything connected with them or somehow resembles them. The output of this mechanism reveals such forms of behavior as support nuclear war against countries of the communist camp, voting for extremist right-wing political candidates, criticizing the UN, speaking out against dissidents, writing protest letters to newspapers, denouncing leftists to the Un-American Activities Committee, and so on. 14
Cm.: Allport G. W. Pattern and growth in personality. N. Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961. Present. ed. pp. 217–461.

As a result of the transformation, the stimulus is generalized: it can be predicted that a person with a given trait will respond in the same way to different stimuli belonging to this set. And, accordingly, if he is prone to one reaction, then you can predict his tendency to other reactions from this list.

In any science, among outstanding scientists one can meet representatives of two main types - "discoverers" and "systematizers". The former discover a new explanatory principle and restructure their field of knowledge in accordance with it. They see reality through the prism of their ideas, they are in danger of bias, one-sidedness, but it is they who provide breakthroughs in science and create scientific schools that further develop the doctrine they founded. The latter, as a rule, have encyclopedic knowledge, which allows them, without introducing new explanatory principles, to systematize and generalize existing knowledge, build general theoretical systems and “make ends meet”. They, of course, also make discoveries, although more private ones. They have students, but no schools, because the school is formed around a bright idea, and not around a system. However, they enjoy great prestige because the ability to integrate different ideas into a system is even rarer than the ability to discover something fundamentally new. There are many examples: the discoverer Plato and the systematizer Aristotle, the discoverer Kant and the systematizer Hegel, the discoverer A.N. Leontiev and the systematizer S.L. Rubinshtein. These two types of scientists complement each other; if one or the other did not exist, science could hardly develop.

Scientists of both types differ in their personal characteristics. To become a "discoverer" you need talent, passion, conviction, work, courage. “Systematizers” are people gifted in a different way: this requires, first of all, intelligence, a broad outlook, erudition, a calmer scientific temperament, which helps rather not to defend one’s own, but to combine different points of view. It requires sincere interest and respect for someone else's position, an objectivity rare even for people of science, which allows them to prefer someone else's, more correct, high degree of scientific humility to their point of view. Finally, there must be professional taste - a flair that allows one to discern through the rubble of traditions and the veil of fashion the sprouts of ideas and approaches to which the future of science belongs. And the nobility, manifested in the disinterested support of these ideas and approaches with all the power of their scientific authority.

All these virtues were combined in Gordon Willard Allport (1897-1967), whose influence on world psychology during his lifetime was difficult to overestimate. Allport belonged to a rare type of systematizers. He was, perhaps, the most intelligent person among those who dealt with the psychology of personality. In one of the articles, he wrote how a psychologist needs imagination. However, the most striking distinguishing feature of Allport himself is logical thinking. Never belonging to the dominant paradigm, he constantly unobtrusively "corrected" the psychology of the individual on the right path. His characteristic style is to smooth over extremes and overcome dichotomies; he can rightfully be called one of the most dialectically thinking psychologists. He was often called an eclecticist, and he agreed with this, specifying that Goethe distinguished between two types of eclecticism: eclecticism, like a jackdaw, which drags into its nest everything that it comes across, and systematic eclecticism, based on the desire to build a single whole from what can be found in various places. Eclecticism of the second type is not a vice, but a very productive method of scientific work.

Perhaps few (if anyone) can be compared to Allport in terms of the number of ideas that are included not in textbooks on personality theories, but in the main body of knowledge of personality psychology - often these ideas now seem so obvious that they are mentioned anonymously, without special attribution. Allport stood at the origins of trait theory, humanistic psychology, wrote the first generalizing textbook on personality psychology and rewrote it a quarter of a century later, legitimized the introduction of qualitative methods into academic science, such research problems as personal maturity, worldview, self-realization, religiosity. He did not make discoveries, did not provide breakthroughs, did not create a school, did not lay a new paradigm, but in many respects it is he who has the merit of creating personality psychology as a special subject area - it can be called the architect of personality psychology without exaggeration. During his life he was awarded all sorts of honors - he was elected president of the American Psychological Association (1939), president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, received the award "For Outstanding Contribution to Science" (1964), etc., but in his autobiography he admitted that among the many The most valuable prize for him was a two-volume collection of works of 55 of his former graduate students presented to him in 1963 with the inscription "from your students - with gratitude for your respect for our individuality." His students are characterized by such distinctive features as the presence of their own position, a holistic approach to the person and scientific non-conformity - otherwise they are very different. Among them are such remarkable psychologists as Leo Postman, Philip Vernon, Robert White, Brewster Smith, Gardner Lindsay, Jerome Bruner and others.

But Allport is great not only because he raised a galaxy of his students, but also because he was able to evaluate many advanced ideas of others, in particular, foreign scientists and provide them with significant support in advancing to the American "scientific market", which is generally extremely biased. applies to everything non-American. In the list of his publications, a huge place is occupied by reviews and prefaces to other people's books. This educational activity was characteristic of Allport all his life - starting from a young age, when, after returning home after a two-year stay in Europe, he began to actively enrich American science with the ideas of V. Stern's personology, the psychology of the spirit of E. Spranger and the Gestalt psychology of K. Koffka, V. Köhler and M. Wertheimer. In his adult years, he actively supported the pioneering research of Kurt Lewin, who immigrated to America. In old age, he was able to appreciate the importance of the ideas of existentialism for psychology, introduced the still unknown Viktor Frankl to the American public and supported the creation of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, although he himself did not enter into any of its structures. A survey of clinical psychologists in the United States in the 1950s found that Allport was second only to Freud in his ideological and theoretical influence.

Nor was he a purely armchair thinker. Another distinguishing feature of Allport's scientific style is to always be at the forefront of the social problems of our time. He strove to study first of all what is more important, and not what is simpler. He created articles and books, milestones for many specific areas and areas of research - the psychology of expressive movements, the psychology of radio, the psychology of rumors, the psychology of war, the psychology of religion. His 600-page work on the nature of prejudice has been the main and unsurpassed source on this problem for almost half a century, and its relevance is growing, unfortunately, every year. The total circulation of this book by 1970 had reached half a million copies.

Gordon Allport's autobiography is included in this volume. Therefore, there is no need to retell in detail his life path, which, however, is quite simple and straightforward - this is the path of an excellent student in the good sense of the word, consistently applying his outstanding intellect and diligence to achieve goals and naturally achieve them.

Current page: 1 (total book has 49 pages) [accessible reading excerpt: 28 pages]

Abstract

For the first time in Russian, the psychological legacy of Gordon Allport, one of the greatest psychologists of the 20th century, who actually created personality psychology as a special subject area of psychological science, is presented in all its richness and diversity.

Psychologists, representatives of related sciences, students of psychological specialties.

Translation: L. Trubitsyna, Dmitry Leontiev

Gordon Allport

GORDON ALPORT - architect of personality psychology

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

ARTICLES OF DIFFERENT YEARS

Personality normal and abnormal

What units should we use?

Open system in personality theory

ego in modern psychology

Trend in motivational theory

Imagination in Psychology: Some Necessary Steps

Basic psychology of love and hate

Religion and prejudice

Rumor analysis

Expectations and war

FORMATION: the main provisions of personality psychology

STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE PERSON

Chapter 1. Psychology and individuality

Chapter 2. Personality, character, temperament

Chapter 6

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 19

Chapter 22

Gordon Allport

The formation of personality. Selected writings

GORDON ALPORT - architect of personality psychology

In any science, among outstanding scientists one can meet representatives of two main types - "discoverers" and "systematizers". The former discover a new explanatory principle and restructure their field of knowledge in accordance with it. They see reality through the prism of their ideas, they are in danger of bias, one-sidedness, but it is they who provide breakthroughs in science and create scientific schools that further develop the doctrine they founded. The latter, as a rule, have encyclopedic knowledge, which allows them, without introducing new explanatory principles, to systematize and generalize existing knowledge, build general theoretical systems and “make ends meet”. They, of course, also make discoveries, although more private ones. They have students, but no schools, because the school is formed around a bright idea, and not around a system. However, they enjoy great prestige because the ability to integrate different ideas into a system is even rarer than the ability to discover something fundamentally new. There are many examples: the discoverer Plato and the systematizer Aristotle, the discoverer Kant and the systematizer Hegel, the discoverer A.N. Leontiev and the systematizer S.L. Rubinshtein. These two types of scientists complement each other; if one or the other did not exist, science could hardly develop.

Scientists of both types differ in their personal characteristics. To become a "discoverer" you need talent, passion, conviction, work, courage. “Systematizers” are people gifted in a different way: this requires, first of all, intelligence, a broad outlook, erudition, a calmer scientific temperament, which helps rather not to defend one’s own, but to combine different points of view. It requires sincere interest and respect for someone else's position, an objectivity rare even for people of science, which allows them to prefer someone else's, more correct, high degree of scientific humility to their point of view. Finally, there must be professional taste - a flair that allows one to discern through the rubble of traditions and the veil of fashion the sprouts of ideas and approaches to which the future of science belongs. And the nobility, manifested in the disinterested support of these ideas and approaches with all the power of their scientific authority.

But Allport is great not only because he raised a galaxy of his students, but also because he was able to evaluate many advanced ideas of others, in particular, foreign scientists and provide them with significant support in advancing to the American "scientific market", which is generally extremely biased. applies to everything non-American. In the list of his publications, a huge place is occupied by reviews and prefaces to other people's books. This educational activity was characteristic of Allport all his life - starting from a young age, when, after returning home after a two-year stay in Europe, he began to actively enrich American science with the ideas of V. Stern's personology, the psychology of the spirit of E. Spranger and the Gestalt psychology of K. Koffka, V. Köhler and M. Wertheimer. In his adult years, he actively supported the pioneering research of Kurt Lewin, who immigrated to America. In old age, he was able to appreciate the importance of the ideas of existentialism for psychology, introduced the still unknown Viktor Frankl to the American public and supported the creation of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, although he himself did not enter into any of its structures. A survey of clinical psychologists in the United States in the 1950s found that Allport was second only to Freud in his ideological and theoretical influence.

* * *

At Harvard, Gordon Allport's intellectual faculties were brought to full strength and direction. In parallel with psychology, he was engaged in social ethics - from a young age, his interest was divided between psychology and the broader social context, and it was not by chance that in the 1930s he created an inherently interdisciplinary department of social relations at Harvard, synthesizing the approaches of psychology, sociology and anthropology.

Under the influence of European ideas, Allport, having taken up the study of personality psychology in the 1920s, primarily personality traits and expressive movements, quickly came to the need to consider the whole personality, and not its fragments. At the university, he was taught in the behavioral tradition, in the spirit of the scheme S-O-R, Where O is an organism that mediates the connection between a stimulus S and reaction R. In fact, says Allport, we find a small S and small R but very, very large O .

However, to approach the whole person from a scientific standpoint, states Allport, is not easy: “as one person noted, the only thing that can be done with a whole person is to give her flowers.” Nevertheless, Allport was the first in world psychology to build an integral theoretical building of the scientific psychology of personality. His book Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, published in 1937, began much of the academic psychology of personality. Personality, according to Allport, is "the dynamic organization of the psychophysical systems of the individual, which determines the unique adaptation of the individual to his environment" . It is interesting that he reproduces almost the same definition 24 years later, only excluding from it (which, however, is very significant) the concept of adaptation: “Personality is a dynamic organization of the psychophysical systems of an individual, which determines his characteristic behavior and thinking” . Personality and character are, in fact, one and the same, only character is a concept, evaluatively loaded, and personality is the same, devoid of evaluation.

Individuality. The problem of individuality and its study in psychology is a question that remained central for Allport throughout his life. He devotes many pages to discussing the problem of uniqueness, the problem of the individual and the general in relation to the psychology of personality. It was he who made the dilemma of the nomothetic and the idiographic the center of consideration in psychology. The nomothetic approach is an attempt to bring any psychological manifestations under general patterns. The idiographic approach is the desire to describe the individual originality of a given case not as a particular manifestation of some general patterns, but as something unique. "Each person in itself is essentially a special law of nature." All psychology, and above all practical, still continues to varying degrees to rush between these two poles. On the one hand, the uniqueness of each person is difficult to deny, on the other hand, general patterns are a prerequisite for the application of some methods, techniques, principles. This problem is especially acute in counseling and psychotherapy, in particular, in the form of a dilemma: to rely on methods and techniques, or to work without relying on them, with the personality of the psychotherapist as his main “tool”.

Allport was the first to subject the problem of the general and the individual in personality to a detailed methodological reflection. In the spirit of the "systematic eclecticism" position, he finds the dilemma "nomothetic - idiographic" unnecessarily pointed; truth in their combination and synthesis. Allport stressed that we should not forget that each person is unique, but this does not mean that it is impossible to find something in common in people. "A general law may be a law about how uniqueness is exercised". The law of uniqueness is the basic law of personality psychology.

Activity and functional autonomy of motives. The fundamental feature of the personality - and here Allport was also practically the first to put this at the forefront - is its activity, proactivity, as he calls it, as opposed to the postulate of reactivity, on which all behaviorism is built. Allport categorically disagrees with the opinion of the majority of psychologists who attribute to man the desire for homeostasis, the reduction of stress. For him, a person is a creature striving to establish and maintain a certain level of tension, and the desire to reduce tension is a sign of ill health. His theory of personality as an open system (see this edition, pp. 62–74) is a new stage in the development of these ideas.

Perhaps the most striking expression of Allport's understanding of personality as active is the principle of functional autonomy of motives he introduced.

The structure of personality. The concept of hell. Emphasizing the individual uniqueness of an individual does not prevent Allport from seriously raising the question of its structural organization: “the success of psychological science, like the success of any science, largely depends on its ability to identify the essential units that make up this particular clot of the cosmos” (present ed. ., p. 354). Analyzing various approaches to the selection of such units (see this ed., pp. 46-61, 354-369), Allport dwells on the concept of features, or dispositions. He did not invent or introduce the concept of traits into psychology, but he was the first to build a generalizing theory and methodology for studying them, gave an explanation of what it is, and his theory is still referred to in textbooks as a dispositional theory of personality. Although Allport was a broad-minded author, far from rigid mechanical and simplified constructions, nevertheless, the concept of personality traits is associated in today's psychology primarily with his name. There was a semi-joking definition in the 1920s that traits are what trait questionnaires measure. Indeed, the concept of traits arose from a measurement procedure, but it was Allport who was able to fill it with real theoretical content and turn the meager definition of a trait as something extracted from questionnaires into a full-blooded scientific psychological concept. At the same time, Allport himself stated unequivocally: “The measurement of different traits was related to the content of my doctoral dissertation, so I got involved in it quite early. But to slap the “psychology of traits” label on my subsequent scientific work is to misunderstand it.”

Traits transform many different stimuli into a certain set of responses. Different sets of traits transform the same stimuli into different responses and vice versa: traits simplify everything, allow you to respond in the same way to different stimuli. Allport illustrates this effect with a personality trait such as fear of communism. In America in the 1950s, the fear of communist aggression reigned, and the attitude towards communism was transferred to a lot. One category of incentives that people with this trait primarily respond to are communists, the books of Marx, neighbors - blacks and Jews, emigrants, intellectuals and liberals, left-wing organizations ... From the communists themselves comes the gradual generalization of everything connected with them or somehow resembles them. The output of this mechanism reveals such forms of behavior as supporting a nuclear war against the countries of the communist camp, voting for extremist right-wing political candidates, criticizing the UN, speaking out against dissidents, writing letters of protest to newspapers, denunciations of leftists to the Commission on Un-American Activities, and so on. Further . As a result of the transformation, the stimulus is generalized: it can be predicted that a person with a given trait will respond in the same way to different stimuli belonging to this set. And, accordingly, if he is prone to one reaction, then you can predict his tendency to other reactions from this list.

Unlike most representatives of the psychology of traits, Allport introduces a methodologically fundamental distinction between common traits and traits of personality, or personality dispositions. Common features are universal features by which all or many people can be compared. Based normal distribution of these traits in a population, questionnaires are constructed to compare the majority of people in a given culture. But there is more individual, or idiosyncratic traits, as Allport calls them, are individually peculiar features of behavior that consistently characterize this person, but unparalleled in the vast majority of other people. Personality, says Allport, can be adequately described only if we take into account not only the general features, determined using the standard psychometric battery, but also individual ones. True, from the methodological point of view, individual traits are much more difficult to determine and measure.

IN last years Allport's life gradually began to replace the concept of a personality or individual trait with the concept dispositions as more content loaded. The concept of a feature refers to ordinary language and is too connected with simplified meanings, meanings that are invested in this word in the context of everyday speech. In addition, it has become so commonplace in professional use among psychologists themselves, and also in such different meanings that it was difficult to put the desired content into it. Therefore, Allport left the concept of traits only for common features personalities that are measured by questionnaires, and what he used to call "individual personality traits" began to be called " personal dispositions» . The concept of disposition essentially acts as an explanatory concept in relation to the descriptive concept of trait. The feature states a certain sequence in the implementation of a certain behavior, but says nothing about the mechanism and stability of this sequence. In later works, Allport pointed to such a feature of personality traits as the possibility of their empirical establishment, evidence of their presence and stability. The concept of disposition denotes a certain psycho-physiological system, which allows us to talk about the causes of the observed stability. It is an unobservable entity postulated to explain observable phenomena.

A lot depends on how we designate traits. Allport owns one of the first lexicographic studies of personality traits through word analysis in English denoting certain features of behavior. He emphasizes that the same features of behavior can be called differently. It is necessary to distinguish the features themselves from their names. One person will call some behavior courageous, another aggressive, and yet another vicious. The most important thing is that the designations of traits do not carry any moral or social assessments, although sometimes this cannot be avoided.

According to Allport, one can say that a person has this or that trait, but it cannot be said that he has this or that type - he fits the type or belongs to the type. Allport's position on typologies in general is rather critical. There can be as many typologies as you like, because any typology is based on an abstraction from the integral personality of one segment and draws boundaries according to one single criterion. "Any typology draws boundaries where there really are none". Depending on which criterion we take, we get different types and the different distribution of people among these types. Therefore, typologies are important and useful for solving practical problems, where we classify people according to the criterion that we practically need. When solving cognitive, research tasks, the task itself does not determine the need to choose any one criterion and ignore all the others. We cannot arbitrarily choose what to take as a basis and what to ignore, so here any typology turns out to be a very artificial procedure.

"I" and "proprium". By themselves, traits cannot fully characterize a person. In 1942 Allport's generalizing article "The Ego in Modern Psychology" appeared (see present edition, pp. 75–92). If in the 19th century it was fashionable to talk about the ego, about the soul, then these philosophically loaded concepts went out of fashion, and in the lexicon of behaviorism, associationism and psychoanalysis that came to replace them, there was no room for concepts expressing the connectedness of the personality, activity and purposefulness. It is time to return these concepts to psychology.

Describing a range experimental studies, Allport found one interesting pattern in them: when a person does something that involves him I and he is not indifferent, consistency, stability, correlations of traits are revealed. And when the ego is not involved, a person is not very interested in what he is doing - stability is broken, unity breaks up and traits appear in some tasks, but not in others.

In the 1950s, Allport introduces a new concept to replace the traditional I- the concept of proprium. He did this solely because the concepts of "ego", "lifestyle", "self" were overloaded with other meanings. Proprium, according to Allport, is close to what W. James once referred to as a sphere I, meaning by this what can be denoted by the word "mine" - what I relate to myself. The main thing that Allport developed in connection with the concept of proprium introduced by him, as well as propriative personality structures, is the periodization of personal development, based on the identification of seven aspects of proprium. This periodization is undeservedly little known, although it is original and hardly inferior in its merits to the much more popular periodization of E. Erickson. It is especially important that in this periodization we are talking about the development of personal structures in the full sense of the word, in contrast to most periodizations. age development, which speak not quite about the person, or not at all about the person.

The first aspect of proprium development is the feeling of one's body, the bodily self. It occurs in the first year of life when infants begin to become aware of and integrate many of the sensations that come from muscles, tendons, ligaments, internal organs, and so on, and come to feel their bodies. As a result, infants begin to separate, to distinguish themselves from other objects, primarily bodily ones. This feeling remains the mainstay of self-awareness for most of life. Adults do not realize it until everything is in order, until they feel some kind of pain or illness. The second aspect is the feeling I, sense of self-identity. It occurs when the child begins to talk about himself "I". Through language, he feels himself as a reference point, awareness and self-reference appear. own name. Through this, the child begins to comprehend that he remains the same person, despite all the changes in his interactions with the outside world. This is mainly the second year of life, although development does not stop - all aspects of identity are not established at once, they continue to develop further, but at this age stage they become leading. Allport localizes this feeling in the second year of life, and in the third year of life he refers to the third aspect of proprium - a sense of self-esteem, which is associated with a sense of pride due to the child's successful completion of some tasks. Adults sometimes consider this negativism, because the child opposes almost all the suggestions of an adult, perceiving them as an encroachment on his integrity and autonomy. The fourth stage falls on the age of 4–6 years. Proprium at this age develops through the expansion of the boundaries of the self: children begin to realize that they own not only their physical body, but also some elements of the world around them, including people; this expansion occurs through the meaning of the word "my". This period is characterized by relapses of zealous possessiveness: my ball, my dollhouse, my mother, my sister, and so on. The fifth aspect of the proprium begins to develop at the age of 5–6 years. This is an image of himself that arises when the child begins to realize how others see him, what is expected of him, how they treat him, how they want to see him. And it is during this period that the child comprehends the difference between "I am good" and "I am bad." It turns out I can be different. The sixth stage covers the period between 6 and 12 years, when the child begins to understand that he is able to find rational solutions. life problems and effectively deal with the demands of reality. Thinking itself appears - reflexive, formal-logical, the child begins to think about the very process of thinking. But this is not independent thinking in the sense that an adult can have it, because at this stage there is no independent morality yet. This stage of development of the proprium reflects a strong conformism towards group values, norms, and moral principles. The child at this stage dogmatically assumes that his family, religion, group is always right. The seventh aspect of the proprium, whose development is largely associated with adolescence, is what Allport calls the propriative drive. The central problem for a teenager is the choice of a career or other life goals. The teenager already knows that the future must be planned, and in this sense he acquires a promising sense of self. There is a focus on the future, the setting of long-term goals, perseverance in finding ways to solve the tasks outlined, a feeling that life has meaning - this is the essence of the propriative desire. This period is not limited to adolescence; all these aspects continue to develop throughout life. In addition to these seven aspects, there is another one that has a special status. Allport designates it as self-knowledge, which synthesizes all the other seven aspects.

Gordon Allport

FORMATION OF PERSONALITY

Selected Truls

Under the general editorship of P.A.Leontiev

Moscow Meaning 2002

UDC 159.923+615.8 LBC 88.37 O 554

Ce-ria "Live Classics"

This publication was published within the framework of the Central European University's "Translation Project" with the support of the Center for the Development of Publishing Activities (OSI - Budapest) and the Open Society Institute. Assistance Fund (OSIAF - Moscow)

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Translation from English by L. V. Trubitsyna and D. A. Leontiev, edited by D. A. Leontiev

Alport G.

Psychologists, representatives of related sciences, students of psychological specialties.

ISBN 5-89357-098-7 © Compilation, translation from English, preface, layout. Publishing house "Sense", 2002.

Gordon Allport - architect of personality psychology

In any science, among outstanding scientists one can meet representatives of two main types - "discoverers" and "systematizers". The former discover a new explanatory principle and restructure their field of knowledge in accordance with it. They see reality through the prism of their ideas, they are in danger of bias, one-sidedness, but it is they who provide breakthroughs in science and create scientific schools that further develop the doctrine they founded. The latter, as a rule, have encyclopedic knowledge, which allows them, without introducing new explanatory principles, to systematize and generalize existing knowledge, build general theoretical systems and “make ends meet”. They, of course, also make discoveries, although more private ones. They have students, but no schools, because the school is formed around a bright idea, and not around a system. However, they enjoy great prestige because the ability to integrate different ideas into a system is even rarer than the ability to discover something fundamentally new. There are many examples: the discoverer Plato and the systematizer Aristotle, the discoverer Kant and the systematizer Hegel, the discoverer A.N. Leontiev and the systematizer S.L. Rubinshtein. These two types of scientists complement each other; if one or the other did not exist, science could hardly develop.

Scientists of both types differ in their personal characteristics. To become a "discoverer" you need talent, passion, conviction, work, courage. “Systematizers” are people gifted in a different way: this requires, first of all, intelligence, a broad outlook, erudition, a calmer scientific temperament, which helps rather not to defend one’s own, but to combine different points of view. It requires sincere interest and respect for someone else's position, an objectivity rare even for people of science, which allows them to prefer someone else's, more correct, high degree of scientific humility to their point of view. Finally, there must be professional taste - a flair that allows one to discern through the rubble of traditions and the veil of fashion the sprouts of ideas and approaches to which the future of science belongs. And the nobility, manifested in the disinterested support of these ideas and approaches with all the power of their scientific authority.

Perhaps few people (if anyone at all) can be compared with Allport in terms of the number of ideas included not in textbooks on personality theories, but in the main body of knowledge of personality psychology - often these ideas now seem so obvious that they are mentioned anonymously, without special attribution. Allport stood at the origins of the theory of traits, humanistic psychology, wrote the first generalizing textbook on personality psychology2 and rewrote it a quarter of a century later3, legalized the introduction of qualitative methods into academic science, such research problems as personal maturity, worldview, self-realization, religiosity. He did not make discoveries, did not provide breakthroughs, did not create a school, did not lay a new paradigm, but in many respects it is he who has the merit of creating personality psychology as a special subject area - it can be called the architect of personality psychology without exaggeration. During his life, he was awarded all sorts of honors - he was elected president of the American Psychological Association (1939), president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, received the award "For Outstanding Contribution to Science" (1964), etc., but in his autobiography he admitted that among the many The most valuable prize for him was a two-volume collection of works of 55 of his former graduate students presented to him in 1963 with the inscription "from your students - with gratitude for your respect for our individuality." His students are characterized by such distinctive features as the presence of their own position, a holistic approach to man and scientific non-conformity - otherwise they are very different. Among them are such remarkable psychologists as Leo Postman, Philip Vernoy, Robert White, Brewster Smith, Gardner Lindsay, Jerome Bruner and others.

1 Cited. by: Evans R.I. Gordon Allport: The man and his ideas. N.Y.: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1970. P.19.

2 Allport G. W. Personality: A psychological interpretation. N.Y.: Holt, 1937.

3 Allport G. W. Pattern and growth in personality. N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961.

he was able to appreciate the significance of the ideas of existentialism for psychology, introduced the still unknown Viktor Frankl to the American public and supported the creation of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, although he himself did not enter into any of its structures. A survey of clinical psychologists in the United States in the 1950s found that Allport was second only to Freud in his ideological and theoretical influence.

Nor was he a purely armchair thinker. Another distinctive feature of Allport's scientific style is to always be at the forefront of the social problems of our time. He strove to study first of all what is more important, and not what is simpler. He created articles and books that were landmarks for many specific areas and areas of research - the psychology of expressive movements, the psychology of radio, the psychology of rumors, the psychology of war, the psychology of religion. His 600-page work on the nature of prejudice4 has been the main and unsurpassed source on this problem for almost half a century, and, unfortunately, its relevance is growing every year. The total circulation of this book by 1970 had reached half a million copies.

At Harvard, Gordon Allport's intellectual faculties were brought to full strength and direction. In parallel with psychology, he is engaged in social ethics - from a young age, his interest was distributed between psychology and the wider social context, and it is no coincidence that in the 1930s he created an inherently interdisciplinary department of social relations at Harvard, synthesizing the approaches of psychology, sociology and anthropology.

A distinctive feature of Allport's scientific outlook was the rather great influence of European psychology, especially William Stern, Eduard Spranger and Gestalt psychology. This was largely facilitated by the young scientist's stay in Europe in the early 1920s; although most textbooks pay attention only to Allport's meeting with Freud, a conversation between them did not work out. Allport was open to a variety of influences, but his powerful intellect allowed him to process them and go his own way.

Under the influence of European ideas, Allport, having taken up the study of personality psychology in the 1920s, primarily personality traits and expressive movements, quickly came to the need to consider the whole personality, and not its fragments. At the university, he was taught in the behavioral tradition, in the spirit of the S-O-R scheme, where O is the organism that mediates the relationship between the stimulus S and the response.

4 Allport G. W. The nature of prejudice. Cambridge (Mass.): Addison-Wesley, 1954.

In fact, says Allport, we find a small S and a small R, but a very, very large O5.

However, approaching the whole person from a scientific standpoint, states Allport, is not easy: “as one person noted, the only thing that can be done with the whole person is to give her flowers”6. Nevertheless, Allport was the first in world psychology to build an integral theoretical building of the scientific psychology of personality. His book Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, published in 1937, began much of the academic psychology of personality. Personality, according to Allport, is “the dynamic organization of the psychophysical systems of the individual, which determines the unique adaptation of the individual to his environment”7. Interestingly, he reproduces almost the same definition 24 years later, only excluding from it (which, however, is very significant) the concept of adaptation: “Personality is a dynamic organization of the psychophysical systems of an individual, which determines his characteristic behavior and thinking”8. Personality and character are, in fact, one and the same, only character is a concept loaded with evaluation, and personality is the same, devoid of evaluation9.

Individuality. The problem of individuality and its study in psychology is a question that remained central for Allport throughout his life. He devotes many pages to discussing the problem of uniqueness, the problem of the individual and the general in relation to the psychology of personality. It was he who made the dilemma of the nomothetic and the idiographic the center of consideration in psychology. The nomothetic approach is an attempt to bring any psychological manifestations under general patterns. The idiographic approach is the desire to describe the individual originality of a given case not as a particular manifestation of some general patterns, but as something unique. “Each person in itself is essentially a special law of nature”10. All psychology, and above all practical, still continues to varying degrees to rush between these two poles. On the one hand, the uniqueness of each person is difficult to deny, on the other hand, general patterns are a prerequisite for the application of some methods, techniques, principles. This problem is especially acute in counseling and psychotherapy, in particular, in the form of a dilemma: to rely on methods and techniques, or to work without relying on them, with the personality of the psychotherapist as his main “tool”.

Allport was the first to subject the problem of the general and the individual in personality to a detailed methodological reflection. In the spirit of the "systematic eclecticism" position, he finds the "nomothetic-idiographic" dilemma unnecessarily pointed; truth in their combination and synthesis. Allport stressed that we should not forget that each person is unique, but this does not mean that it is impossible to find something in common in people. "A general law can be a law that tells how uniqueness is exercised"11. The law of uniqueness is the basic law of personality psychology.

5 Cited. Quoted from: Evans R. I. Gordon Allport: The man and his ideas. N. Y.: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1970. P. 14.

6 Ibidem. P.9.

7 Allport G. W. Personality: A psychological interpretation. N.Y.: Holt, 1937. P. 48.

8 Allport G. W. Pattern and growth in personality. N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961.

9 Allport G. W. Personality: A psychological interpretation. N.Y.: Holt, 1937. P. 52.

10 Ibidem. P. 21. "Ibidem. P. 194.

The most complete expression of the individual uniqueness of an individual is the sphere of his expressive, or expressive, manifestations, in relation to which Allport uses the concept of style. “Only by style do we recognize Chopin's music, Dali's paintings, and Aunt Sally's pasta” (nast, ed., p. 440). Allport paid great attention to this area of research since the late 1920s. The experimental data he cites indicate that the subjects manage to surprisingly successfully identify different forms of expressive manifestations - handwriting, gait, face, etc., belonging to the same people, although the mechanisms of this stylistic unity of individuality remain poorly understood. A person most of all manifests himself as an individuality not in what he does, but in how.

Activity and functional autonomy of motives. The fundamental feature of the personality - and here Allport was also practically the first to put this at the forefront - is its activity, proactivity, as he calls it, as opposed to the postulate of reactivity, on which all behaviorism is built. Allport categorically disagrees with the opinion of the majority of psychologists who attribute to man the desire for homeostasis, the reduction of tension. For him, a person is a creature striving to establish and maintain a certain level of tension, and the desire to reduce tension is a sign of ill health. His theory of personality as an open system (see present, ed., pp. 62-74) is a new stage in the development of these ideas.

Perhaps the most striking expression of Allport's understanding of personality as active is the principle of functional autonomy of motives he introduced.

In “Trends in Motivational Theory” (see this ed., pp. 93-104), Allport talks about the emerging bias towards indirect methods of diagnosing motivation, based on a basic distrust of what a person himself knows about his motivation. Why not ask a person directly about his motives before "digging" deep? This looks a bit naive at first glance. Allport begins to analyze the situation in more detail, relying on experimental data, and formulates, on the basis of this analysis, the requirements for what the theory of psychodynamics, that is, motivation, should be. He states that, according to a number of studies, projective methods, firstly, do not reflect some of the motives that are clearly and reliably present in a person. Secondly, in people who are healthy, without severe problems, there is a good agreement between the data obtained on the basis of direct and indirect methods of motivation analysis. Their projective methods add little to their direct self-report. In people with personality conflicts, there is a discrepancy between the direct and projective pictures. Their projective methods really make it possible to reveal those motives that are not directly captured. But unless we use methods of direct self-report, says Allport, we will not be able to determine whether we are dealing with motives that are accepted, realized and integrated into the structure of the personality, or with repressed infantile fixations that exert their influence in an implicit way, giving rise to conflicts in personal structure. In these two cases, we have motives that are completely different in origin and characteristics of influence on the personality, but it is impossible to distinguish between these cases without referring to reflective consciousness. It is necessary to combine both sources of information - only then will we have a complete picture.

The structure of personality. The concept of hell. Emphasizing the individual uniqueness of the individual does not prevent Allport from seriously raising the question of its structural organization: “the success of psychological science, like the success of any science, largely depends on its ability to identify the essential units that make up this particular clot of the cosmos” (nast, ed. ., p. 354). Analyzing various approaches to the allocation of such units (see present, ed., pp. 46-61, 354-369), Allport dwells on the concept of traits, or dispositions. He did not invent or introduce the concept of traits into psychology, but he was the first to build a generalizing theory and methodology for studying them, gave an explanation of what it is, and his theory is still referred to in textbooks as a dispositional theory of personality. Although Allport was a broad-minded author, far from rigid mechanical and simplified constructions, nevertheless, the concept of personality traits is associated in today's psychology primarily with his name. In the 1920s, there was a semi-joking definition: Traits are what trait questionnaires measure. Indeed, the concept of traits arose from a measurement procedure, but it was Allport who was able to fill it with real theoretical content and turn the meager definition of a trait as something extracted from questionnaires into a full-blooded scientific psychological concept. At the same time, Allport himself stated unequivocally: “The measurement of different traits was related to the content of my doctoral dissertation, so I got involved in it quite early. But to put the label "psychology of traits" on my subsequent scientific work is to misunderstand it.

For Allport, a trait is not just a statistically fixed pattern, a statement of observed behavior, but a certain neuropsychological system specific to a given individual. Hell, in the most superficial pre-

12 See: Allport G. W. Becoming: basic considerations for the psychology of personality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. Present. ed. pp. 166-216.

13 Op. Quoted from: Evans R. I. Gordon Allport: The man and his ideas. N. Y.: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1970. P. 24.

setting, - the predisposition to behave in a similar way in different (but not in all) situations. Two aspects of this stability of behavior are stability over time and stability with respect to different situations. Of course, there are situations when we behave differently than usual, but those situations in which the behavior is similar may not be exactly the same. If a person shows the same features (for example, anxiety) every time in an exam, but outside the exam situation these behavioral features are absent, his anxiety cannot, strictly speaking, be considered a personality trait. The latter manifest themselves in a wide range of situations, and not just in one area. Here is an example that Allport gives: if a person is inherently timid, then he will remain calm and restrained in the street, and in the store, and in a taxi, and in the audience, and anywhere. If he is basically friendly, then he will be friendly always and with everyone. The fact that actions, or even habits, are not consistent with certain traits does not mean that these traits do not exist. Thus, a very pedantic, punctual and collected person can become nervous and careless when he misses the train. Further, traits are not independent of each other. There is a correlation between distinctly different features that do not match. As an example, Allport cites consistently observed correlations between intelligence and a sense of humor - it is clear that these are not the same thing, but the correlations are theoretically quite explainable.

Traits transform many different stimuli into a certain set of responses. Different sets of traits transform the same stimuli into different responses and vice versa: traits simplify everything, allow you to respond in the same way to different stimuli. Allport illustrates this effect with a personality trait such as fear of communism. In America in the 1950s, the fear of communist aggression reigned, and the attitude towards communism was transferred to a lot. One category of stimuli to which people with this trait primarily react are the communists, the books of Marx, neighbors - blacks and Jews, emigrants, intellectuals and liberals, organizations of the left wing ... From the communists proper comes the gradual generalization of everything that is connected with them or somehow resembles them. The output of this mechanism reveals such forms of behavior as supporting a nuclear war against the countries of the communist camp, voting for extremist right-wing political candidates, criticizing the UN, speaking out against dissidents, writing letters of protest to newspapers, denunciations of leftists to the Commission on Un-American Activities, and so on. further14. As a result of the transformation, the stimulus is generalized: it can be predicted that a person with a given trait will respond in the same way to different stimuli belonging to this set. And, accordingly, if he is prone to one reaction, then you can predict his tendency to other reactions from this list.

14 See: Allport G. W. Pattern and growth in personality. N. Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961. Present. ed. pp. 217-461.

denominations that consistently characterize a given person, but have no analogues in the vast majority of other people. Personality, - says Allport, - can be adequately described only if we take into account not only the general features determined using the standard psychometric battery, but also individual ones. True, from the methodological point of view, individual traits are much more difficult to determine and measure.

In the last years of his life, Allport gradually began to replace the concept of a personal or individual trait with the concept of disposition as more meaningfully loaded. The concept of a feature refers to ordinary language and is too connected with simplified meanings, meanings that are invested in this word in the context of everyday speech. In addition, it became so commonplace in professional use among psychologists themselves, and also in such different meanings, that it was difficult to put the desired content into it. Therefore, Allport left the concept of traits only for general personality traits, which are measured by questionnaires, and what he used to call "individual personality traits", began to call "personality dispositions"15. The concept of disposition essentially acts as an explanatory concept in relation to the descriptive concept of trait. The feature states a certain sequence in the implementation of a certain behavior, but says nothing about the mechanism and stability of this sequence. In later works, Allport pointed to such a feature of personality traits as the possibility of their empirical establishment, evidence of their presence and stability. The concept of disposition denotes a certain psycho-physiological system, which allows us to talk about the causes of the observed stability. It is an unobservable entity postulated to explain observed phenomena.

A lot depends on how we designate traits. Allport owns one of the first lexicographic studies of personality traits through the analysis of English words denoting certain behavioral features16. He emphasizes that the same features of behavior can be called differently. It is necessary to distinguish the features themselves from their names. One person will call some behavior courageous, another - aggressive, the third - vicious. The most important thing is that the designations of traits do not carry any moral or social assessments, although sometimes this cannot be avoided.

According to Allport, one can say that a person has one or another trait, but one cannot say that he has one or another type - he fits the type or belongs to the type. "Allport's position in relation to typologies in general is quite critical. Typologies can be as many as you like, because any typology is based on an abstraction from the integral personality of one segment and draws boundaries according to one single criterion. “Any typology draws boundaries where in fact there are none.”18 Depending on which criterion we take, we will get different types and different distribution of people by these types.Therefore, typologies are important and useful for solving practical problems, where we classify people in accordance with the criterion that we practically need.When solving cognitive, research problems, the task itself does not determine the need for choice

16 Allport G.W., Odbert H.S. Trait-names: a psycho-lexical study // Psychological Monographs. 1936 Vol. 47. No. 211. P. 1-171.

17 Allport G. W. Personality: A psychological interpretation. N.Y.: Holt, 1937. P. 295.

18 Ibidem. P. 296.

any one criterion and ignoring all the others. We cannot arbitrarily choose what to take as a basis and what to ignore, so here any typology turns out to be a very artificial procedure.

"I" and "proprium". By themselves, traits cannot fully characterize a person. In 1942 Allport's generalizing article "The Ego in Modern Psychology" appeared (see present, ed., pp. 75-92). If in the 19th century it was fashionable to talk about the ego, about the soul, then these philosophically loaded concepts went out of fashion, and in the lexicon of behaviorism, associationism and psychoanalysis that came to replace them, there was no room for concepts expressing the connectedness of the personality, activity and purposefulness. It is time to return these concepts to psychology.

Having described a number of experimental studies, Allport discovered one interesting pattern in them: when a person is engaged in something that involves his Self and is not indifferent to him, consistency, stability, correlations of traits are found. And when the ego is not involved, a person is not very interested in what he is doing - stability is broken, unity breaks up and traits appear in some tasks, but not in others.

In the 1950s, Allport introduced a new concept to replace the traditional self - the concept of proprium19. He did this solely because the concepts of "ego", "lifestyle", "self" were overloaded with other meanings. Proprium, according to Allport, is close to what W. James once referred to as the sphere of the Self, meaning by this what can be denoted by the word "mine" - what I refer to myself. The main thing that Allport developed in connection with the concept of proprium introduced by him, as well as the propriative structures of personality, is the periodization of personal development, based on the identification of seven aspects of proprium. This periodization is undeservedly little known, although it is original and hardly inferior in its merits to the much more popular periodization of E. Erickson. It is especially important that in this periodization we are talking about the development of personal structures in the full sense of the word, in contrast to most periodizations of age development, which do not speak entirely of a person, or not at all about a person.

19 See: Allport G. W. Becoming: basic considerations for the psychology of personality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. Present. ed. pp. 166-216.

zano with a sense of pride due to the successful completion of some tasks by the child. Adults sometimes consider this negativism, because the child opposes almost all the suggestions of an adult, perceiving them as an encroachment on his integrity and autonomy. The fourth stage falls on the age of 4-6 years. Proprium at this age develops through the expansion of the boundaries of the self: children begin to realize that they own not only their physical body, but also some elements of the world around them, including people; this expansion occurs through the meaning of the word "my". This period is characterized by relapses of zealous possessiveness: my ball, my dollhouse, my mother, my sister, and so on. The fifth aspect of the proprium begins to develop at the age of 5-6 years. This is an image of himself that arises when the child begins to realize how others see him, what is expected of him, how they treat him, how they want to see him. And it is during this period that the child comprehends the difference between "I am good" and "I am bad." It turns out I can be different. The sixth stage covers the period between 6 and 12 years, when the child begins to understand that he is able to find rational solutions to life's problems and effectively cope with the demands of reality. Thinking itself appears - reflexive, formal-logical, the child begins to think about the very process of thinking. But this is not independent thinking in the sense that an adult can have it, because at this stage there is no independent morality yet. This stage of development of the proprium reflects a strong conformism towards group values, norms, and moral principles. The child at this stage dogmatically assumes that his family, religion, group is always right. The seventh aspect of the proprium, whose development is largely associated with adolescence, is what Allport calls the propriative drive. The central problem for a teenager is the choice of a career or other life goals. The teenager already knows that the future must be planned, and in this sense he acquires a promising sense of self. There is a focus on the future, the setting of long-term goals, perseverance in finding ways to solve the planned tasks, the feeling that life has meaning - this is the essence of the propriative desire. This period is not limited to adolescence; all these aspects continue to develop throughout life. In addition to these seven aspects, there is another one that has a special status. Allport designates it as self-knowledge, which synthesizes all the other seven aspects.

Mature personality. Allport was the first to introduce the idea of a mature personality into psychology, noting that psychoanalysis never considers an adult as a truly adult20. In his 1937 book, he devoted a separate chapter to the mature personality, formulating three criteria in it. personal maturity. The first criterion is the diversity of autonomous interests, the expansion of the "I". A mature person cannot be narrow and selfish; she considers the interests of other relatives and important people like your own. The second is self-consciousness, self-objectification. He also includes here such a characteristic as a sense of humor, which, according to experimental data, correlates best with self-knowledge. The third criterion is the philosophy of life. A mature personality has its own worldview, in contrast to an immature personality.

In later works, he expands and supplements the list of these criteria, describing already 6 main parameters of a mature personality (see present, ed., pp. 35-45,

"Allport G. W. Personality: A psychological interpretation. N. Y.: Holt, 1937. P. 216.

330-354), which incorporate the first three. Firstly, a psychologically mature person has wide boundaries of the Self. Mature people are busy not only with themselves, but also with something outside of themselves, actively participate in many things, have hobbies, are interested in political or religious issues, in what they consider significant. Secondly, they have the ability to close interpersonal relationships. In particular, Allport mentions friendly intimacy and sympathy in this connection. The friendly intimate aspect of relationships is the ability of a person to show deep love to family, close friends, not colored by possessive feelings or jealousy. Empathy is reflected in the ability to be tolerant of differences in values and attitudes between oneself and other people. The third criterion is the absence of large emotional barriers and problems, good self-acceptance. Mature people are able to calmly relate to their own shortcomings and to external difficulties, without reacting to them with emotional breakdowns; they know how to cope with their own conditions and, while expressing their emotions and feelings, they consider how it will affect others. The fourth criterion is that a mature person demonstrates realistic perception as well as realistic claims. He sees things as they are, not as he would like them to be. Fifth, a mature person demonstrates the ability for self-knowledge and a philosophical sense of humor - humor directed at oneself. Sixth, a mature person has a whole philosophy of life. What is the content of this philosophy does not play a fundamental role - the best philosophy does not exist.

The reason for these changes in the set of criteria for a mature personality, as his student T. Pettigrew noted at the symposium in memory of Allport, was largely their joint trip to South Africa to study racial problems. There they saw people who fit Allport's original definition of a mature person, but who did evil regularly and routinely. Allport later openly admitted that he underestimated the role of sociocultural factors in shaping personality.

In this edition, we decided to focus on Allport's main general theoretical views, leaving aside his classical applied studies of social problems: rumors, prejudices, religion and others, which, like everything he touched, bear the easily recognizable imprint of his brilliant intelligence and indifference. Many of them have retained their significance to this day, and work on Russian editions of Allport's monographs on the problems of religiosity and the psychology of prejudice has already begun. But it is precisely his general theoretical positions that give an idea of the scale of his personality, and it is they that make it possible to fill the gaping gaps in our understanding of the development of personality psychology in the 20th century.

This publication is based on two books: a short monograph "Becoming", written on the basis of a course of lectures delivered by Allport at the special invitation of the Terry Foundation, and containing a concentrated expression of the new that Allport introduced into the psychological understanding of personality, and a voluminous textbook "Structure and development of personality ”, published here in its entirety. Not included were chapters of a predominantly review nature, devoted to those aspects of the personality, in the development of which the author's contribution of Allport himself is comparatively

21 See: Evans R. I. Gordon Allport: The man and his ideas. N. Y.: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1970. P. 122-123.

but small. It should, however, be noted that Allport's unique style as a creative individual permeates this entire textbook: whatever he writes about, his handwriting cannot be confused with anyone else; moreover, it is not always possible to determine from the text whether he is writing a textbook for junior students or articles for sophisticated professionals.

In addition to these two books and Autobiography, we included in the publication a number of key theoretical articles by G. Allport, which were included in the golden fund of psychology of the 20th century. In terms of content, these articles partly overlap with both books, as well as books with each other, but this did not bother us. To avoid repetition, one would have to violate the integrity of the texts, and this would be incompatible, first of all, with the whole spirit of Allport's theory, which puts integrity in the first place. Therefore, we deliberately kept some repetitions; Allport is such an author, who cannot be too much, especially since we practically did not know him for a long time.

Every personality psychologist, whether he likes it or not, talks about himself by no means only in his autobiography. Gordon Allport was a unique, active, integrated, mature, forward looking individual. He left us the psychology of a unique, active, integrated, mature, future-oriented personality.

D.A.Leontiev Doctor of Psychology

Gordon Allport becoming a person to read. Becoming a Personality (Allport Gordon). The formation of personality. Selected writings

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Collection of ideal social studies essays

Anti-Soviet rebellion in Hungary (1956)