Personality And The Behavior Disorders - Vol I

PERSONALITY and the BEHAVIOR DISORDERS A HANDBOOK BASED ON EXPERIMENTAL AND CLINICAL RESEARCH Edited by J. McV. HUNT DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE OF WELFARE RESEARCH, COMMUNITY SERVICE SOCIETY OF NEW YORK. FORMERLY, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY, BROWN UNIVERSITY VOLUME I THE RONALD PRESS COMPANY NEW YORK EDITORS PREFACE The study of personality and its development draws heavily upon nearly all of the life sciences. In the recent past, anyone endeavoring to become familiar with the scientific knowledge about the behavior of whole individuals inevitably found himself wandering back and forth across the traditional boundaries between the sciences. This work brings together forty contributors representing the life sciences and seeks to present the major portion of theory, investigative fact, and clinical practice from all those scientific fields that have contributed to this knowledge. This is not a work feasible for the pen of any one man, for the topics covered range through the structure and assessment, the dynamic devel opment and determinants, and the disorders and therapy of personality. Furthermore, many of the thirty-five chapters survey developments of the last decade in subfields where the details of theory and research are known only to small coteries of workers. Each chapter has been written by one or more authorities in the subject concerned. Each author has endeavored to survey his field with technical jargon minimized or defined immediately, and with ample documentation to serve as a bridge to the original literature, so that his expositions may serve both as a text for students beyond the elementary level and as a reference work for mature clinicians, investigators, andteachers. Understanding the individual person, until almost the last half century, was left largely to the artist, or the moral philosopher. Whole organisms, and especially htiman beings as molar objects, were unadapted to traditional laboratory - approaches. The various scientific subjects bit off their diverse parts to chew them in isolation. Only as the inductive implications of clinical observation were gradually clarified did it become possible to design experimental studies of the whole organism and its development. Due partly to the growing impact of the work of Galton and of Freud, and partly to the cumulative effects of the application of the scientific method, the volume of scientific output on personality has snowballed. It has recently become clear, moreover, that the traditional boundaries between the sciences have obstructed progress in this field, and that a cross-disciplinary approach is required. To assemble this literatuie and gather the results of this investigation into more compact exposition and to foster this cross-disciplinary approach to the study of personality have been the two principal aims in the design of this work. iii iv EDITORS PREFACE It is unreasonable to expect uniformity of terminology and point ot view at this time in this dynamic field. In fact, the editor has deliberately invited contributors who represented not only various life sciences but even divergent points of view within these sciences. Yet this work is not a symposium of systematic views, for each author gives a survey of the fact and research strategy of his subfield. For instance, no account of psychoanalytic doctrine as such appears, but several authors are analysts, andpsychoanalysis is described as a clinical method of research. More over, its influence upon many of the subfields may easily be discerned. Agairi, no exposition of the tenets of the psychobiological schools appears, but several authors were trained in this school and its influence may be noticed in many of the subfields. The same goes for behaviorism, etc. Because the emphasis of this book is upon the whole organism or per son, the first term in the title is Personality...