This text presents a contemporary description of personality psychology in an historical perspective and makes projections as to the future of its developmental course. As this broad field of inquiry has a rich, venerable, and storied past, I thought it necessary not only to devote the introductory chapter to it, but also to place the material in the individual chapters in their relevant cultural contexts. Academics and professionals typically acknowledge the importance of understanding the history of their disciplines and their scientific evolution (see Cunningham and Napier, 2008, in their touching obituary to Anne Elizabeth Kelley [1954–2007]). Paradoxically, however, ahistoricism is still rampant, not only in textbooks of the social sciences and psychotherapy, but also in journal articles and reference works. In consequence, I have considered not only the products of current researchers in personality psychology but also those of their distinguished predecessors in times past. Over the past two centuries alone there have been sea changes in scientists' conceptualizations of major aspects of human personality. Such changes continue and need to be situated in their historical contexts.

The thriving sectors of inquiry into personality psychology that we witness today, and which require a multi-volume encyclopedia to delineate adequately, have their origin in the science revolution that was rekindled in the late Renaissance and effloresced in the West in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.