Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- 1 Historical precursors of personality theory
- 2 From illness to wellness models of human nature
- 3 Developmental perspectives on personality: from youth-based to life-span models
- 4 The biology of personality
- 5 Trait theories and the psychology of individual differences
- 6 The puzzle of the self
- 7 Culture and personality
- 8 Gendered personality
- 9 Emotions and reasoning: a definition of the Human
- 10 Taking the measure of the Human: benefits and inherent limitations of personality measures
- 11 Can personality change? The possibilities of psychotherapeutics
- 12 The disordered personality: evolution of nosological systems
- 13 Eight appendices: at the margins of personality psychology
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- 1 Historical precursors of personality theory
- 2 From illness to wellness models of human nature
- 3 Developmental perspectives on personality: from youth-based to life-span models
- 4 The biology of personality
- 5 Trait theories and the psychology of individual differences
- 6 The puzzle of the self
- 7 Culture and personality
- 8 Gendered personality
- 9 Emotions and reasoning: a definition of the Human
- 10 Taking the measure of the Human: benefits and inherent limitations of personality measures
- 11 Can personality change? The possibilities of psychotherapeutics
- 12 The disordered personality: evolution of nosological systems
- 13 Eight appendices: at the margins of personality psychology
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A History of Personality PsychologyTheory, Science, and Research from Hellenism to the Twenty-First Century, pp. ix - xivPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010