in defense of the individuality of personality theories

In Defense of the Individuality of Personality TheoriesAuthor(s): Jane LoevingerSource: Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1996), pp. 344-346Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1448819 .

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COMMENTARIES

whole personological house can get together and cele- brate a prefuturist toast to the field as we approach the millennium. It will be held at our place, on the second floor. But that, as McAdams would be the first to tell us, is another story.

Note

Brian R. Little, Department of Psychology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario KIS 5B6, Canada.

References

Cantor, N. (1990). From thought to behavior. "Having" and "doing" in the study of personality and cognition. American Psycholo- gist, 45, 735-750.

Cartwright, L. (1994). Medicine is my lust: The story of a woman physician. In C. E. Franz & A. J. Stewart (Eds.), Women creating lives: Identities, resilience and resistance (pp. 201-212). Boul- der, CO: Westview.

Craik, K. H. (1991, August). The lived day of an individual:A person environment perspective. Invited address presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco.

Emmons, R. (1986). Personal strivings: An approach to personality and subjective well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 1058-1068.

Eysenck, H. J., & Eysenck, M. W. (1985). Personality and individual differences: A natural science approach. New York: Plenum.

Little, B. R. (1983). Personal projects: A rationale and method for investigation. Environment and Behavior, 15, 273-309.

Little, B. R. (1987). Personality and the environment. In D. Stokols & I. Altman (Eds.), Handbook of environmental psychology (pp. 205-244). New York: Wiley.

Little, B. R. (1989). Personal projects analysis: Trivial pursuits, mag- nificent obsessions and the search for coherence. In D. M. Buss

& N. Cantor (Eds.). Personality psychology: Recent trends and emerging directions (pp. 15-31). New York: Springer-Verlag.

Little, B. R. (1993). Personality and the distributed self: Aspects of a conative psychology. In J. Suls (Ed.), Psychological perspectives on the self (Vol. 4, pp. 157-181). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Little, B. R. (1995, August). Personal contexts: A rationale and methodsfor investigation. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, New York.

Little, B. R., Lecci, L., & Watkinson, B. (1992). Personality and personal projects: Linking Big Five and PAC units of analysis. Journal of Personality, 60, 502-525.

McAdams, D. P. (1994). Can personality change? Levels of stability and growth in personality across the life span. In T. F. Heather- ton & J. L. Weinberger (Eds.), Can personality change? (pp. 299-313). Washington, DC: American Psychological Associa- tion.

Melia-Gordon, M. L. (1993). Defining moments as nodal points between project systems: When do we know what we are doing? Unpublished manuscript, Department of Psychology, Carleton University.

Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1995). A cognitive-affective system theory of personality: Reconceptualizing situations, disposi- tions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. Psycho- logical Review, 102, 246-268.

Murray, S. L., & Holmes, J. G. (1994). Storytelling in close relation- ships: The construction of confidence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 650-663.

Oatley, K. 0. (1992). Best laid schemes: The psychology of emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Salmela-Aro, K. (1992). Struggling with the self: The personal projects of students seeking psychological counselling. Scandina- vian Journal of Psychology, 33, 330-338.

Sarbin, T. (1995, August). Poetics of identity. Henry A. Murray award address presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, New York.

Semin, G. R., & Gergen, K. J. (1990). Everyday understanding: Social and scientific implications. London: Sage.

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In Defense of the Individuality of Personality Theories

Jane Loevinger Department of Psychology

Washington University, St. Louis

A few years ago, a colleague and I taught some undergraduate honors students how to score the Sen- tence Completion Test (SCT) for ego development (Loevinger, Wessler, & Redmore, 1970). Each student did an honors thesis on a different topic, and they cooperated to administer and score all the tests. One studied the relation of the Five Factors as measured by the NEO-PI (Costa & McCrae, 1985) to ego development as measured by the SCT. Another studied Type A

versus Type B personality in relation to the five factors. One studied sex differences of the college student sub- jects on the SCT. Another studied published suicide notes in terms of the writers' inferred ego stage.

Reading their theses at semester end, I was troubled that, although each student was thoroughly immersed in her own chosen approach to personality as if it were the whole field, no one asked how all these topics could be viewed together. I began to feel like Alice, looking

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through the garden gate and seeing a beautiful well-cultivated garden, but then moving on to look through another gate at another well-cultivated garden. Each of the topics is related to a large, well-cultivated garden of research.

The Five-Factorists believe they have a picture of personality as a whole; some of us studying ego development feel the same, and those who have studied Type A and Type B personalities are not necessarily more modest in their claimed purview. We are all studying the same kinds of people, albeit in different terms. In our class, the question was particularly acute, because all but one of the studies were of literally the same sample of persons.

The question none of us asked is precisely the one Dan McAdams answers in "Personality, Modernity, and the Storied Self: A Contemporary Framework for Studying Persons." It is fortunate none of us tried to tackle the question. Reading the present target article I realize that we could not, severally or collectively, have begun to handle the issues raised. Having teetered on the brink of tackling the question myself, I am im- pressed with the accomplishment here. The target article is exhaustively comprehensive, brilliant, and origi- nal in its integration of impossibly disparate approaches to personality.

But as a proponent of a theory of personality-spe- cifically, of the concept of ego development-I am uncomfortable in the face of a grand theory that swal- lows all other theories of personality. However, a theory has to have a subject and a predicate, so it is not clear that the target article presents a theory. It claims rather to be a framework, so it could be called a metatheory.

As to the "storied self," I am enthusiastic. In re- sponse to the drumbeat of claims for the putative "emerging consensus in favor of the Five Factor The- ory," it is refreshing to read of the "emerging social-science emphasis on the narrative study of lives."

The emphasis on modernity is now almost obliga- tory and will crescendo as we count down to the year 2000. In view of the magnitude of his achievement, it may seem carping to add that McAdams's language is not altogether felicitous. "Selfing" does not pass as the Queen's English. One test of an idea in personality theory is to translate it into other languages. Selfing is not easily rendered in French or German. Is it just another name for creation of the "self-system" (Sulli- van, 1953)?

Although the "individual person" is invoked in the first sentence, that is what I miss most. How does the framework change one's view of an individual life? Would it have been feasible to bring one person in-perhaps Anne Frank or Nelson Mandela-either of

whom could be used to illustrate how a person can be a self or maintain a self in the face of an overwhelming but all-too-common tragic impingement of the violent (modern!) world on the individual?

Having been promised a synthesis of theories that will permit the consideration of persons, whole and undivided, it is disconcerting to be confronted with the I and the me as separate, almost as personifications. In some places, one could just substitute "person."

For what McAdams is trying to do, I cannot imagine a better solution. His article would make a superb outline for a book on personality theories.

My main concern is whether the target article is aimed at the right target. Is a common framework exactly what the study of personality needs?

Kohlberg (1976) and his "cognitive-developmental" colleagues have maintained that confronting dilemmas and the clash of different views is itself a source of moral and cognitive growth (see also Perry, 1970). I fear that in a grand conciliatory framework, we would lose just the most vital throbbing part of each theory (such as transference in psychoanalysis or the confron- tation of conscientiousness as one of five factors with that of the conscientious ego stage (Loevinger, 1994).

John Stuart Mill, in writing on freedom of thought and discussion, pointed out that when issues large and important enough to kindle enthusiasm were in question, the scale of mental activity rose, and "impulse given which raised even persons of the most ordinary intellect to something of the dignity of thinking beings" (1859, Ch. II).

Personality theories are not threatened by the Babel of rival personality theories as much as they are by neuro- physiologists and biochemists and technocrats. The shrinkage of personality psychology as it yields territory to neurophysiology and biochemistry is the problem; computer technocrats have already taken over trait theory. It is precisely the individuality and vitality of personality theories that remain as the elan vital of psychology.

Note

Jane Loevinger, Department of Psychology, Wash- ington University, St. Louis, MO 63130.

References

Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1985). The NEO Personality Inventory manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Re- sources.

Kohlberg, L. (1976). Moral stages and moralization: The cognitive-developmental approach. In T. Lickona (Ed.), Moral development and behavior (pp. 31-53). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Loevinger, J. (1994). Has psychology lost its conscience? Journal of Personality Assessment, 62, 2-8.

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Loevinger, J., Wessler, R., & Redmore, C. (1970). Measuring ego development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Mill, J. S. (1859). On liberty. London.

Peny, W. G., Jr. (1970). Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Sullivan, H. S. (1953). The interpersonal theory of psychiatry. New York: Norton.

Theories and Stories

James E. Marcia and Janet Strayer Department of Psychology Simon Fraser University

We would like to say from the outset that our comments come from a position sympathetic to that of McAdams's. Each of us teaches at least one course from an essentially narrative point of view (Developmental Aspects of Folk Tales and Psychological Perspectives on Comparative Mythology). In addition, each of us has extensive experience in the traditional natural science methodology of psychology. The questions McAdams wrestles with, we wrestle with, and our comments are, for the most part, less criticisms than they are statements of issues that continue to be problematic.

An initial issue concerns the extent to which one takes seriously, and does something about, contextualization. The problem with focusing on the individual narratives of "the deeply contextualized adult" is that this is unlikely to produce generalizations ("laws") describing human behavior, unless the individual tales are to be used inductively as reports or observational data for hypothesis formation. And these hypotheses are likely to be interactional ones based on what we learn from persons and contexts. Doing this suggests not that our theories are inadequate or insufficiently tested, but that in the 100 or so years of psychology as a discipline, our observations have been insufficient. Perhaps they have been. They are limited as any observations must be by the theories, implicit or explicit, that tell us what is worth "observing." The subject's own report to us also reflects such choices.

Description may be, as McAdams states, more basic than explanation, but every description is also, to some extent, an explanation. No one describes from an atheoretical standpoint; it is just that the theory is not typically explicit or complete. Whom one chooses to describe, what aspects of their lives are selected, how the descriptions are couched-all of these are guided by some (usually implicit) theory. So now, are we to make better, more phenomenologically "pure" theories by specifying the contextualization of the observer? And how far are we to go with this? Gender, social class, sexual orientation, birth cohort, unconscious fantasies,

an indefinite taxonomy of situational contexts? What we then end up with is a "deeply contextualized observer" regarding a "deeply contextualized other," both of whom may have purposes for engaging in the inter- action that are not consciously available, but are still influential. We may say that it is important to know how "people understand their lives," but this is always ac- complished through the filter of how we understand people understanding their own lives.

If we consider as valid only the "momentary expres- sion of the particular," then postmodernist "playful irony" risks degeneration into cynicism and a kind of scientific "know-nothingism." It is not that the postmodernist view is inaccurate; it is just not particularly useful for creating scientifically testable ideas. It is useful for reminding us of the limitations of any of our ideas in face of other plausible ones. And here, too, the narrative approach has something to offer in emphasiz- ing that "a good story" (e.g., coherence, internal consis- tency, persuasiveness) makes for plausibility. How- ever, even good stories escape falsifiability. And, if we care about this criterion (the crucial one that distin- guishes the scientific paradigmatic from the narrative approach), then we must invoke standards other than the goodness of a story.

In the light of our language becoming more and more scrutinized for its sexual and cultural biases and our research expected to become more and more contextualized, a new Puritanism casts its shadow. Science is, by its nature, approximate. No one knows precisely when the Brooklyn Bridge, left unrepaired, would fall down. We make informed guesses-about its demise and about the construction of better bridges. No one knows for certain if or when their patient will commit suicide. It would be truly tragic if we ceased or delayed research on suicide risk until we could scrupulously contextualize every aspect of ourselves and of our research participants. We work, then, in terms of guiding, approximate, and falsifi- able paradigms.

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in defense of the individuality of personality theories

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