Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood by Ian A. M. Nicholson
Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood by Ian A. M. Nicholson
English | Jan 2003 | ISBN: 155798929X | 324 Pages | PDF | 27 MB
English | Jan 2003 | ISBN: 155798929X | 324 Pages | PDF | 27 MB
He argues that personality's emergence as an object of science was linked to the gradual demise of character and the self-sacrificing, morally grounded self that it supported. Carefully highlighting Allport's complex commitments to both science and spirituality, Nicholson examines the rich cultural and historical contexts that framed the emergence of personality as a discipline, revealing multiple (even contradictory) meanings of ""personality"" in the language of American selfhood. He asserts that ""personality's"" appeal lay in its ability to integrate and obscure the complex polarities of material and spiritual; old and new; masculine and feminine; and freedom and control - categories rendered unstable in a new and distinctively modern age.