http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1330499

Psychology of personality

"The purpose of this volume is to present a description of the personality as seen from the holistic, field-psychological, and perceptual points of view. These views when applied to the study of personality form an image of the person which is at once both humanistic and supported by recent developments in the natural sciences. Our aim in this book is to study personality as a whole. It is impossible, we believe, to study the whole person by investigating his separate parts. We cannot apprehend the nature of personality by discreet analyses of learning, motivation, language, the attitude-value complex, the folkways and mores of the community. At the basis of and implicit in every study of human behavior is the problem of organization--the problem of how descriptive units cohere to make a unified and dynamic structure. The point of view implicit in every aspect of the psychology of personality expounded in this book is that, while we may theoretically isolate various elements of the total personality, and examine every individual apart from his social context--the in situ method permits us to do that--each is in fact only a part of a more inclusive whole. Again, the whole is not a summation of parts, but a dynamic unity--a moving and reciprocal relationship of parts to whole"--Book. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

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