The concept of personality in 19th-century French and 20th-century American psychology

THE CONCEPT OF PERSONALITY IN19TH-CENTURY FRENCH AND 20TH-CENTURY

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY

Giovanni Pietro Lombardo and Renato FoschiUniversity of Rome “La Sapienza”

Since the 1920s, the road to the acknowledgment of personality psychology as afield of scientific psychology that has individuality as its object began with thefounding of the discipline by Gordon W. Allport. Historians of psychology havemade serious attempts to reconstruct the cultural, political, institutional, and chro-nological beginnings of this field in America in the 20th century. In this literature,however, an important European tradition of psychological studies of personalitythat developed in France in the 2nd half of the 19th century has been overlooked.The aim of this article is to cast some light on this unexplored tradition ofpsychological personality studies and to discuss its influence on the development ofthe scientific study of personality in the United States.

One of the historical criteria that have been proposed to determine the birthof a subdiscipline is the publication of one or more handbooks containing thebasic notions, history, and methods of the new research field (Gourevitch, 1995).In 1937, as is well known, the booksPersonality: A Psychological Interpretation,by Gordon W. Allport (1897–1967), andPsychology of Personality, by RossStagner (1909–1997), were published, followed in 1938 byExploration in Per-sonality, edited by Henry A. Murray (1893–1988). In particular, Allport’sPer-sonality and Murray’sExploration were to have a great effect on the developmentof a new “personality psychology.” From here an “American” genealogy of thediscipline is usually traced, which conventionally considers 1937 its inauguralyear.

From 1937 on, there is said to be a shift from a scientific psychology thatstudied only a few psychological functions, seeking laws that were common to themajority of individuals, to a new perspective on psychological studies that had asits object “individuality” in the widest sense and that was capable of integratingthe studies carried out in the other fields of psychology. Differentiating itself froman original Wundtian psychology that studied psychic functions in general, a newconception of psychology thus appeared, which tended to favor, within the study

Giovanni Pietro Lombardo is professor of personality psychology and history of psychology atthe University of Rome “La Sapienza.” He is the author of several publications, most related to thehistory of personality psychology, Italian psychology, and clinical psychology.

Renato Foschi is a contract professor at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” His researchinterests include personality psychology and history of psychology.

This article is the result of a research project led by the authors and financed by the Universityof Rome “La Sapienza” and by the Faculty of Psychology 1, which aims to describe the historicalfoundations of personality psychology.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Giovanni Pietro Lombardo orRenato Foschi, Facolta` di Psicologia 1, Universita` “La Sapienza,” via dei Marsi 78, 00185 Roma,Italy. E-mail: [email protected] or [email protected]

History of Psychology2003, Vol. 6, No. 2, 123–142

Copyright 2003 by the Educational Publishing Foundation1093-4510/03/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1093-4510.6.2.123

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of the empirical subject, an integrated and unitary scientific approach. Whereasthe first psychology favored laboratory studies, the more modern psychology’sresearch perspective appeared to be founded on a wide methodological pluralism.Furthermore, with the American personality psychology an important paradig-matic revolution took place: The notions of temperament and character wereprogressively replaced by that of personality, and psychologists began to deal forthe first time with nonpathological personality (Craik, Hogan, & Wolfe, 1993).

Personality Psychology in Contemporary Historiography

There has been recent renewed interest in the history of personality psychol-ogy and the naive assumption that personality psychology was born at the end ofthe 1930s (Barenbaum, 1997, 2000; Danziger, 1990, 1997; Nicholson, 1996,1997a, 1997b, 1998, 2000; Parker, 1991; Winter, 1997; Winter & Barenbaum,1999). Most of these studies have attempted to give a detailed picture of theAmerican situation in the period leading up to the publication of the threefounding handbooks, and they grant a special place to Gordon Allport in institu-tionalizing the discipline. Danziger (1997), among others, attempted an originalexamination of those “situational mutations” that led to a “point of no return”represented by personality psychology. According to Danziger (1997), the deci-sive precondition for the “naturalization” of personality was its medicalization,carried out in 19th-century France, and William James’s (1842–1920) adoption ofthis point of view. “Certain French doctors” began to consider personality nolonger as a metaphysical principle but rather as an “embodied entity as muchprone to disease as other such entities.” Theodule Ribot (1839–1916) definedpersonality as a tout de coalition (an associated whole), a structure of empiricallymeasurable dimensions.

Thus the path was cleared for the componential model of personality as ametahistorical object of knowledge, which was assimilated by American philo-sophic and scientific culture. After all, American psychologists between 1910 and1920 were mainly interested in collecting data about large masses of individuals,having widely accepted the Galtonian paradigm of the measurement of individualdifferences in “ intellectual” phenomena by means of mental tests. Americansociety was experiencing a rapid growth of “demand for rationalized, impersonalmethods of social selection on a mass scale” (Danziger, 1997, p. 126); inaccordance with social management and control, it became essential to elaboratemethods for measuring and differentiating nonintellectual traits on the occasion ofU.S. mobilization for the first world war (Parker, 1991; Winter & Barenbaum,1999).

Between 1920 and 1930, the mental hygiene movement provided a framewithin which psychologists began to measure nonintellectual dimensions toidentify cases of potential maladjustment and to prescribe therapeutic treatment;these dimensions were studied not only as medical or pathological objects but alsoas guides to foresee and prevent future psychological disturbance (Danziger,1990; Parker, 1991). Works of applied psychology concerning nonintellectualtraits became so numerous as to require a specific subdiscipline to serve ascontext; the notion of personality, already popularized and used in applications,was adapted to define the new discipline in place of the term character, which

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presented moral overtones, and the term temperament, which might appear topsychologists to be compromised by physiological reductionism (Danziger,1997). According to this view, starting in the 1920s, personality became inde-pendent of abnormal psychology, which was considered a domain of psychiatry,by both the mental hygiene movement and by social psychologists and became thebasis of a new field of scientific psychology (Barenbaum, 2000; Nicholson, 2000).

In our opinion, although this interpretation is immensely useful to explaincurrent American personality psychology, it overlooks some European psycho-logical traditions that were the basis of the modern psychological study ofpersonality (Lombardo & Foschi, 2002). Among these traditions one must em-phasize that of French scientific psychology, in which, as Danziger (1997) noted,the notion of personality became for the first time a “natural object” of psycho-logical knowledge. Danziger’s hypothesis in particular requires a closer look atthe scientific category of personality emerging in 19th-century French psycho-logical experimentalism.

In 1987, American psychologists commemorated, in a series of celebrations,the 50th anniversary of the birth of personality psychology. Stagner himselfconsidered the designation of 1937 as the year in which the discipline was bornto be a mere convention: He noted that whereas on the one hand Germanexperimentalists ignored the phenomena that today belong to the domain ofpersonality, on the other hand in the writings of Jean Martin Charcot (1825–1893)and Pierre Janet (1859–1947) can be discerned as “ancestral influences” onpersonality psychology (Stagner, 1993, p. 24). Stagner therefore located in theFrench rather than the German scientific tradition some of the original foundationsof what subsequently became the scientific study of personality.

French Origins of the Scientific and Psychological Notion of Personality

To what extent was the scientific concept of personality elaborated in Francein the 19th century? Furthermore, can a historiographical analysis reveal funda-mental notions of the previous French research assimilated and elaborated insubsequent personality psychology?

In France the year 1870 marks the foundation of a scientific tradition ofpsychological studies with characteristics that differentiated it from the Britishand German traditions. Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) and Ribot are rememberedas the major representatives of this current of studies; Ribot especially is consid-ered the founder and major organizer of French psychology (Carroy & Plas, 1993,1996; Mucchielli, 1998; Nicolas, 2002; Nicolas & Murray, 1999). Thanks toRibot’s work, the French psychological tradition was initially characterized by thestudy of pathology, from which it is also possible to detect basic components ofnormal psychology. In this sense, French experimental psychology has been apathological psychology in which clinical phenomena are considered as experi-ments spontaneously offered by nature to the observer (Ribot, 1910; see alsoCarroy & Plas, 1993, 1996). The volume Les Maladies de la Personnalite (TheDiseases of the Personality; Ribot, 1885) was the third of a series that also dealtwith diseases of the memory and the will, composing a sort of model on the basisof which Ribot defined the most relevant fields of French scientific psychology.Thus, it is legitimate to see in France the birth of a positive psychology founded

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on the study of personality. Characteristic of this birth was the institution of a newchair—psychologie experimentale et comparee (experimental and comparativepsychology)—offered to Ribot in the College de France, that replaced an alreadyexisting chair—droit de la nature et des gens (law of nature and of people; Nicolas& Charvillat, 2001). It is no coincidence that Paul Janet (1823–1899), a philos-opher, influential scholar, and uncle of Pierre Janet, intervening during the intenseacademic debate that followed the change of title, included the psychological andpsychopathological facts linked to the notion of personality in the domain of the“new” psychology so that experimental psychology could be distinguished from“philosophical” psychology (Janet, 1888, pp. 540–542).

Starting in the 1870s, various publications appeared in France dealing withnormal and pathological mutations of personality, dissociation and doubling ofpersonality, memory and personality, and consciousness and personality. Anextensive chapter concerning the person and the moi can be found in Taine’s(1870) book De l’Intelligence (On Intelligence; 1870, Book I, Section IV, chapter3). Taine claimed that the feeling of the moi, which represents the person in itswholeness, is an integrated aggregate, not a mere sum of parts, of psychologicalevents (ideas, images, feelings), detached from physiological ones. Subsequently,Taine would confirm his model of the moi on the basis of clinical observationscollected by others (Taine, 1876; see also Foschi, 2002). At roughly the sametimes, Emile Littre (1801–1881), a famous lexicographer, historian, and positivist,in his dictionary of the French language, defined personality as “what belongsessentially to one person, what makes it that one and not another one” and added,quoting Charles Bonnet (1720–1793), that personality is founded on memory(Littre, 1873). Bonnet himself, a central figure in 18th-century scientific andpsychological research, provided a seminal description of personality in the EssaiAnalytique Sur les Facultes de l’Ame (Analytic Essay on the Faculties of the Soul;1760) and in Contemplation de la Nature (Contemplation of Nature; 1764).Bonnet described personality as an existence that coordinates through memoriesand feelings and as a conscious moi, which is in turn the result of the reflectionand integration of such feelings (Bonnet, 1760, pp. 80–81).

In 1875, Littre published an essay in La Philosophie Positive, a journal heedited, called “La Double Conscience. Fragment de Physiologie Psychique”(Double Consciousness. Fragment of Psychic Physiology), which has personalityas its main theme and presents the outlines of theory of psychologie pathologique.This article summarizes several clinical accounts that emphasize a particularsensation, communicated by the patient, of a double existence, or describegenuine alternative existences in the same person. On the basis of such empiricalexaminations, Littre treated consciousness as the main constitutive element ofpersonality and showed its discontinuity, as demonstrated by the two parallelexistences in the same person that are unaware of each other. In Littre’s (1875)words, “Consciousness or personality . . . is a product, created by the aggregationand integration of psychic properties,” and “pathology is a perpetual experiment,”providing data that could not be obtained in any other way (p. 335). Through theobservation of pathological facts, one can detect a disjunction (disjonction) ofconsciousness or of the components of personality, which function in a unitaryway in the normal state. Littre (1875) ultimately criticized all those metaphysicaland spiritualist positions that, on the basis of revelation or philosophical intuition,


consider intellect, consciousness, and personality as a unitary product of the soul,supporting instead a doctrine of psychic functions based on scientific observationand rooted in what he defined as “positive philosophy” (pp. 335–336).

It is clear that Littre’s intervention took on enormous importance in the battleagainst spiritualist philosophical doctrines that considered psychic facts to belongto their own domain and did not appreciate scientific treatment of those facts. YetLittre, as a pupil of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), preferred to discuss personalityin the field of psychic physiology rather than psychology, a term he considered tohave metaphysical connotations (Nicolas, Marchal, & Isel, 2000). Besides, in1873 there was a certain agitation in the philosophical world because of the idea,expressed in the third chapter of Ribot’s thesis, that even personality and the mostintimate components of the moi were dependent on the laws of heredity (Ribot,1873; see also Brooks, 1998). The notion of personality became, therefore, thebattleground where old and new conceptions of psychological research confrontedeach other.

From the second half of the 1870s on, various articles on psychology in thepages of the Revue Scientifique, an important journal of the time, revealed a newinterest in the discipline and led to genuine debates by correspondence on centralresearch topics such as the question of measurement. The same journal alsopublished Ribot’s first articles on Wilhelm Wundt’s physiological psychology(Nicolas & Murray, 1999; Nicolas, Segui, & Ferrand, 2000). In 1876, the RevueScientifique contained a debate between Eugene Azam (1822–1899) and PaulJanet on the notion of personality, arranged by the editor, Emile Alglave (1842–1928). The debate was sparked by the publication of Azam’s famous presentation,at the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, of the case of Felida. Azam’sfirst contribution to the debate describes the particular phenomena of doubling ofpersonality during the last 20 years of Felida’s life; then the case is placed in itsscientific context (Azam, 1876/1992; see also Carroy, 1991, 2001). In our opinion,the main innovation found in the presentation concerns Azam’s attempt to providean objective description, through diagrams, of the empirical elements that makeup personality and that caused Felida’s ailments. Azam (1876/1992) asserted thatthe main element of personality is memory and that Felida’s doublings ofpersonality are mostly definable as periodic amnesias and therefore as disconti-nuities in the perception of existence. He kept close to a neurological explanationof Felida’s personality pathology, which he believed originates in a shrinking ofcerebral blood vessels and consequent dysfunction of the cerebral “seat” dedi-cated to memory.

We find in Azam’s (1876/1992) argument echoes of Bonnet’s personalityconcept and a fascinating anticipation of the methods of modern neuropsychol-ogy. This work would be seen by Taine as an empirical confirmation of his ideaof the moi (Carroy & Plas, 1993). Its importance is confirmed by the fact that, asnoted, Alglave requested a comment from Paul Janet, the prestigious representa-tive of French eclectic spiritualism. This comment, significantly, was called “LaNotion de la Personnalite” (The Notion of Personality) (Janet, 1876). For Janet,cases of double consciousness provide, more than dreams and somnambulism, achance to define what personality means. If the moi presents itself as double, whatbecomes of its unity, which is the foundation of spiritualist psychological doc-trine? Identifying personality with consciousness, Janet (1876) concluded that if,


on the one hand, personality is based on a fundamental and indivisible feeling ofthe existence of the moi, on the other hand it is also based on the “ feeling ofindividuality” (sentiment de l’individualite), which, on the contrary, is “made upof a variety of elements, some of which are external to the true moi” (p. 574).There are, therefore, an internal, intimate, and indivisible moi and an external,empirical, and social moi. Janet considered the intimate and unitary concept of themoi a philosophical issue, but at the same time he approved the scientific study ofthe external elements of personality that change and, as the clinical cases dem-onstrate, are discontinuous. Incidentally, we should add that a comparison be-tween Paul Janet’s conception of the moi and the 10th chapter of James’s (1890)Principles, “Consciousness of Self,” show certain truly surprising similarities inthe argumentation.

This first debate on Felida, in the Revue Scientifique, continued until 1879.Charles Dufay, a doctor and member of Parliament, also took part in the discus-sion, and on the basis of his clinical experience confirmed Azam’s observationsbut criticized his etiological ideas (Dufay, 1876, 1879). It is interesting to notehow Azam, after the criticism of his first presentation, accepted Janet’s compro-mise solution, which he called “ ingenious and subtle” (1876, p. 268), and left toothers the psychological consequences of his observations. In the contributionsthat followed, Azam restricted himself to enriching his account and to examiningthe hypothetical causes of Felida’s crises. He later claimed that they depended oncirculatory problems in the right hemisphere, which, after Paul Broca’s (1824–1880) discoveries about the left hemisphere, he considered the seat of memory(Azam, 1876, 1877, 1878, 1879).

During the 1880s, the argument about personality was undoubtedly one of themost important themes of French research. In 1880, in the pages of the RevuePhilosophique, a journal founded by Ribot and the first fundamental point ofreference of the nascent French scientific psychology, appeared an article byFrederic Paulhan (1856–1931) entirely dedicated to personality. Paulhan, whosetraining was philosophical, contributed frequently to the Revue Philosophique,writing on and reviewing topics of psychology, especially personality and char-acter. He started his initial article by questioning the idea of personality in Frenchspiritualist philosophy, using evidence that “positive psychology” was beginningto provide (Paulhan, 1880). He claimed that the moi, if observed from theempirical or “positive” point of view, is a totally different concept from the moiof spiritualist philosophers, which turns out to be metaphysical. The empirical moi“presents itself as a more or less continuous chain of phenomena of conscious-ness,” whereas the metaphysical moi is nothing but a unified “ representation,”which is conditioned by the laws of representation (p. 67). Paulhan’s (1880)contribution therefore attempted to distinguish between a metaphysical and ap-parent conception of personality and a psychological and positive one, which withits laws determines the first one.

In 1881, the first psychological monograph of Ribot’s famous trilogy, LesMaladies de la Memoire (Diseases of Memory), was published. In this work Ribotdealt systematically with the problem of personality, taking as his main startingpoint the debate on Azam’s (1876/1992) presentation. Ribot claimed that person-ality, or the moi, is not reducible to a distinct and unitary entity but is acombination, a result of complex states rooted in memory. Normal personality, for


Ribot, was essentially made up of two elements: (a) the sensorial feeling of one’sbody and (b) conscious memory. Illness would therefore derive from variationsamong the elements that make up personality and from continuity or discontinuityof memory (Ribot, 1881, chapter 2, paragraph 3).

Ribot’s ideas called forth other scientific presentations on the theme of normaland pathological variations of personality. In 1882, the Revue Philosophiquepublished Paulhan’s essay on “Les Variations de la Personnalite a l’ Etat Normal”(Variations of Personality in the Normal State), and in 1883 the Revue Scientifiquecontained Azam’s “Les Alterations de la Personnalite” (Alterations of Personal-ity). Paulhan’s analysis in particular is a description of the normal functioning ofpersonality on the basis of his pathology and the work of Littre, Azam, Dufay, andRibot. He began:

Pathological phenomena seem to be an exaggeration of physiological phenomena,and they allow us to explain the true nature of the latter and to recognize in thenormal states what would not have been possible without an analysis of patho-logical phenomena. (1882, p. 640)

For Paulhan, personality was made up of many connected “ tendencies”which, in pathological cases, result in various “personalities” in the same indi-vidual. The tendencies that make up personality approach unity, but the trulyunitary element in which they are rooted is the organism (1882, p. 653).

For his part, in “Les Alterations de la Personnalite,” Azam (1883) aimed tostudy personality not from a physical point of view but from an intellectual ormoral one. In fact, his article is exclusively a description of behaviors observablein particular cases caused by intoxication, cerebral pathologies, hypnosis (som-nambulisme provoque), and double consciousness. The article does not add muchto what Azam had already published in the first debates about Felida, with theexception of a note he added at the end, in which he stated that he was acquaintedwith an “eminent philosopher” who was about to publish a book about personalitydiseases from a psychological point of view and claimed that he had dealt with thesame theme in a medical light. He hoped that the work of both writers iscompleted, so as to shed light on a topic that is still highly obscure (p. 618). Azamthen introduced readers to Ribot’s Les Maladies de la Personnalite, a remarkablysuccessful book that appeared in a succession of editions and translations begin-ning in 1885.

In 1883 and 1884, in fact, Ribot published three extensive articles in his RevuePhilosophique, dedicated to the organic conditions, and the affective and intel-lectual bases, of personality. The combination of these three articles made up thewhole 1885 monograph (Ribot, 1883, 1884a, 1884b). The order of publication ofthe articles reflected two key points on which Ribot’s theory was based: (a)personality is made up of organic, affective, and intellectual dimensions, and (b)such dimensions represent the evolutionary context in which personality shouldbe dealt with. The organic roots are the first elements of personality, followed byaffective dimensions and, finally, the intellectual elements are capable of account-ing for consciousness, the highest form of individuality. Sickness sets off aprocess of involution whereby these elements “dissolve” in reverse order, begin-ning with the intellectual, then the affective, and finally the organic. Ribot’s studyof personality therefore aimed to describe scientifically individuality and “ the


concrete and complex whole” of elements that constitute it—tout de coalition—using pathology as a source of data with the ability to separate elements thatnormally work in a coordinated way (Ribot, 1883, p. 620). It must be emphasizedthat in his conclusions he returned to the debate with the spiritualists in order toobserve, once again, that the philosophical idea of personality as a single andindivisible moi is not acceptable. From the psychological point of view, heinsisted, the moi is a coordination that “oscillates between pure unity and absolutenon coordination” (Ribot, 1884b, p. 446).

From 1885, personality became one of the busiest research fields for the firstgeneration of French psychologists (Foschi, 2002). From a perspective differentfrom Ribot’s, Alfred Binet (1857–1911) also undertook the study of pathologicalphenomena in order to analyze normal psychology. It has been shown that he wasinfluenced by an alternative version—supported by Taine—of the pathologicalmethod (Carroy & Plas, 1993). He concentrated on “singularities,” “ abnormali-ties,” and “uniqueness” in certain individuals who, being “exceptional,” couldenlighten researchers about aspects of psychic life (Plas, 1994). In this context,Binet repeatedly returned to the study of personality. Among other things, hepublished On Double Consciousness in English in 1890, and in 1892 Les Alter-ations de la Personnalite (Alterations of Personality), a book dedicated to Ribot.In Les Alterations de la Personnalite, Binet claimed that he wanted to take a stepbeyond what was written in Les Maladies de la Personnalite. Whereas Ribotconsidered the moi and personality as a coordination of more or less clear statesof consciousness, accompanied by a variety of nonconscious physiological phe-nomena, Binet tended to make distinctions among the moi, consciousness, andpersonality. Even without reaching a definitive theory on the basis of experimentsconducted through hypnosis, he refined Ribot’s thesis and attributed a particularcentrality to the study of “superior phenomena” of psychic life and therefore ofconsciousness in describing the dimensions of personality that seem to be uncon-scious (Binet, 1892, p. 316).

Binet’s inclination toward the study of “singularities” and of “superior phe-nomena” would be incorporated, from 1895 on, in the project of developing anindividual psychology (psychologie individuelle). In this project his objective wasabove all to describe the way in which psychic dimensions integrate in theindividual, rather than to classify the “average” functioning of psychic facts. Binetwould explicitly distinguish his approach from German experimental psychology,from English anthropometrics, and from Lombrosian “anthropology” through theparticular emphasis he placed on individuality and superior psychic phenomenaand on the original use of a variety of testing techniques to measure them (Binet& Henri, 1896; see also Binet, 1897, 1898). Therefore, Binet anticipated severalthemes and methodological considerations in the scientific approach to individ-uality of Allport’s personality psychology. Although the project of an individualpsychology gradually faded in its original formulation, it led to the events thatbrought Binet, in cooperation with Theodore Simon (1873–1961), to the formu-lation of his famous intelligence test (Fancher, 1998).

Pierre Janet’s contribution to the study of personality needs to be examinedfrom a different point of view. In all of Janet’s work, in fact, personality is acrucial element. In his earliest articles, which appeared in the Revue Philos-ophique from 1886 on, he already was dealing with the theme of dissociation of


personality; in 1889, the notion became of central importance in Janet’s philos-ophy dissertation, L’Automatisme Psychologique: Essai de Psychologie Experi-mentale sur les Formes Inferieures de l’Activite Humaine (Psychological Autom-atism: An Essay of Experimental Psychology on the Inferior Forms of HumanActivity). Carroy and Plas (2000a, 2000b) have recently provided an acutehistorical analysis of Janet’s first period of research on personality, emphasizingits links with the previous philosophical tradition. They consider Janet’s work asparadigmatic of a context in which the birth of French scientific psychology, farfrom constituting a “ fracture” with the previous philosophical tradition, turns outin reality to be deeply indebted to it. In particular, Carroy and Plas have provedthe paradoxical thesis that spiritualist psychology, sharply attacked by Taine andRibot, had actually anticipated some themes of the new pathological psychology.Pierre Janet’s work should therefore be considered as an effort to salvage conceptselaborated by some French philosophers, especially Maine de Biran (1766–1824),for the new scientific psychology, based on the pathological method.

To supply further explanation it is useful to make brief reference to thehistorical analysis of studies on personality that Janet made in December 1895, onthe occasion of his first lesson as Ribot’s substitute in the course of experimentaland comparative psychology at the College de France (Janet, 1896). Janet’s(1896) goal was to show the historical mutations through which, from an originalmetaphysical matrix, the study of personality developed into a field of experi-mental psychology (p. 97). He thus discussed the notion of personality in philos-ophy from ancient times to the 19th century, but in describing the transition fromphilosophical psychology to scientific psychology Janet showed a certain intol-erance toward a psychology that was still tied to metaphysics and that, with itscontinuous argumentation, tended not to be satisfied with small facts but alwayswanted to discuss large problems. He emphasized that the methodological limi-tation of this psychology lies in its use of the self-observations of the phenomenaof consciousness, which in his view suffered from an excessive subjectivity andled to abstract psychological theories. The pathological method alone, he claimed,provides an empirical basis capable of making psychology scientific and objective(p. 101). Janet went on to state that philosophers such as Maine de Biran,hypnotizers, doctors, and alienists had already furnished many observations basedon the pathological method. In this sense Ribot has the merit of reassemblingthese observations scattered in medical and philosophical research and thus ofcreating a new scientific psychology that distinguished itself from the other19th-century experimental traditions by its use of the psychological method.

The argument led Janet (1896) to conclude that (a) the psychological study ofpersonality does not refer to any metaphysical school and leaves any theoreticalposition on the soul possible; (b) to study personality it is necessary to considerfeelings, images, acts, and functions of synthesis that constitute it; and (c) thestudy of personality can be considered experimental because it approaches vari-ations of the dimensions of personality from a clinical perspective. The clinicalobservation of pathological phenomena is thus the only way to make the elementsand functioning of personality evident and objective (p. 103).

For Janet, personality therefore represents a boundary between the old andnew psychology. Although he tended constantly to recall and refer to psycholog-ical concepts already elaborated in philosophy, Janet assumed that personality is


now the domain of experimental psychology and that as such it should beconsidered independent from any metaphysical tradition. Incidentally, it is worthrecalling that throughout the first decades of the 20th century Janet was devel-oping his own “personality psychology”— empirical, social, and developmen-tal—at the same time that Allport’s model was about to emerge as the only onecapable of integrating all psychological knowledge in a precise and delimited fieldof psychology, dedicated to personality (Janet, 1929).

“Personality” in American Psychology

As Danziger (1990) noted, during the 19th and 20th centuries psychologicalexperimentation developed throughout Europe according to three main and, insome ways, alternative paradigms that inspired different epistemological points ofview in subsequent research: (a) Wundtian experimentalism, inaugurated in theLeipzig laboratory; (b) the French model of clinical experiments; and (c) theBritish psychometric tradition linked to the name of Francis Galton (1822–1911).The study of personality does not seem to belong to the scientific domain ofWundtian experimental psychology (Wundt, 1873–1874). In the works of EdwardBradford Titchener (1867–1927), a psychologist of British origin usually remem-bered as the most important proponent of the Wundtian tradition in the UnitedStates, one finds no research devoted to personality (Titchener, 1896, 1901–1905).

In American scientific psychology the notion of personality was introduced byWilliam James (Coon, 2000; Leary, 1990; Taylor, 1996). The 10th chapter ofPrinciples of Psychology (James, 1890) contains a description of the construct ofthe “self” and definitions of phenomena linked to the notion of personality. In it,James introduced the themes of the conflict between different selves and ofpersonal identity. He maintained that identity is formed by the individual percep-tion of transitive states of consciousness; such states are perceived as memoriesthat show an inherent constitutive discontinuity. Identity therefore presents mu-tations that reveal themselves especially in the pathology of psychological phe-nomena. The main reference here is to the French tradition of experimentalpsychology; James referred to, and showed a close acquaintance with, Azam,Taine, Ribot, Binet, and Pierre Janet. Janet is the most quoted author in the 10thchapter of the Principles (Ferreri, 2000). James’s 1890 essay “The Hidden Self”is a true homage to Janet’s “clinical experimentation” and to the French traditionof personality studies (James, 1890/1983a; see also Taylor, 1996).

As Taylor (1996) noted, James elaborated an original formulation of theconcept of personality in “Person and Personality,” an encyclopedia entry pub-lished in 1895 (James, 1895/1983b). In it, he deals with some theoretical andscientific problems linked to the notion. Quoting John Locke (1632–1704), heclaimed that personality is the effect of consciousness and individual memories.For James, the observation in a single individual of simultaneous or successivedifferent consciousnesses gives scientific and psychological importance to per-sonality. Discontinuities of memory—memories that alternate between oblivionand reminiscence during wakefulness, sleep, or hypnosis—empirically demon-strate the existence of particular states in individual consciousness. Cases ofalternate personalities, trance, and demonic possession are “ facts” that pose ascientific question about the unifying principle of personality and take on critical


relevance in the face of idealist and spiritualist philosophical trends. An urgenttask of psychology, James insisted, is to analyze the meaning and the limitationsposed by the phenomena studied during early scientific research on personalityand individual consciousness.

In the first decades of the 20th century, in the works of Morton Prince(1854–1929), one finds further references to the experimental and clinical studyof personality from which a debt to the French psychological tradition can beinferred (Prince, 1929). In 1906, Prince published The Dissociation of a Person-ality, in which the famous case of Miss Beauchamp was described, and in thesame year he founded the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, which publishedvarious articles about personality and, during the first years of its activity, manyessays by Pierre Janet, including the first article in the first volume (Janet, 1906).Renamed the Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Social Psychology in 1921,the journal dedicated many articles to topics that would turn out to be fundamentalfor the development of personality psychology (Barenbaum, 2000). A thoroughreview of its issues shows a discontinuity between a French clinical model and aGaltonian psychometric model of experimentation on personality. Danziger(1990) indeed remarked that in 1925 the journal, on becoming a publication of theAmerican Psychological Association and newly retitled as the Journal of Abnor-mal and Social Psychology (JASP), showed a drastic change in the methodolog-ical approach of published articles. Whereas in 1924, 80% of the empirical articlespublished were based on the study of individual cases, this proportion fell to 25%in the following year, when there was a preponderance of empirical articles usingthe psychometric model. At the same time, JASP published some of GordonAllport’s early articles on the notions of trait and personality (F. H. Allport &Allport, 1921; G. W. Allport, 1924, 1929, 1931).

In our opinion, James’s (1890) Principles and Wundt’s (1873–1874) Grund-zuge were genuine prototypes of the systemization of psychology in subsequenthandbooks. As an example, one might cite the work of Robert Session Wood-worth (1869–1962). In the last chapter of Psychology: A Study of Mental Life(1921), Woodworth described personality in terms of “ the individual as a whole,integrated or partially dissociated” ; the references here are to James, Janet, Prince,and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). On the other hand, Woodworth’s ExperimentalPsychology (1938), a text constructed more closely on the Wundtian model,dedicates no space to the treatment of personality. One might expect that Wood-worth, one of the most influential popularizers of psychology in the 20th century,would take into consideration on the one hand psychology tout court, inspired byfunctionalism and open to applications, and on the other hand an experimentalpsychology of Wundtian inspiration. All psychological phenomena studied in asystematic way, including individual differences, belong to the domain of theformer, whereas the latter is limited to the exclusive study of those psychophys-iological phenomena that are best suited to experimental and laboratory research.Subsequent editions of Woodworth’s Psychology show the same discontinuityfound in JASP. In 1921, the chapter on personality is based on the methodologyand concepts of the French experimentalist tradition, but in the second edition of1929 and the third edition of 1934 this tradition is gradually replaced by thepsychometric perspective of traits and of large-scale tests that represents the


dominant paradigm from which American personality psychology would derive(Parker, 1991).

From the 1920s onward, personality psychology emerged as a sector ofscientific psychology. Through his publications, Allport became the greatestinspirer of the “new” fi eld of study. In his first article one sees that there is alreadyan attempt to move away from previous theorizations, which Allport called“ rag-bag theories of personality” because they include in a chaotic way tenden-cies, impulses, appetites, instincts, and in general all the innate and acquireddispositions (G. W. Allport, 1921, p. 442). A formative experience for Allport wasa postdoctoral fellowship in Germany in the fall of 1922; from this time on theinfluence of William Stern’s (1871–1938) personalistic psychology, WilhelmDilthey’s (1833–1911) and his pupil Eduard Spranger’s (1882–1963) “under-standing” psychology, and the theoretical and methodological approach intro-duced by the Gestalt psychologists were fundamental to Allportian personalitypsychology (Nicholson, 1996, 2000). Along these lines, Allport published “TheStudy of Undivided Personality” in JASP, in 1924. In it, he laid out the funda-mental methodological principles of his personality psychology. To study per-sonality, he claimed, it is necessary to study “ the way in which traits are joinedtogether,” and this integrated totality is different from the sum of the single traits.Allport (1924) added: “This form of combination, or form-quality, is irretrievablylost in any scheme for the analysis of personality” (p. 140). Allport’s referencesare to both Gestalt psychology and “understanding” psychology.

Allport once again dealt with the topic of “concepts of trait and personality”in a 1927 article published in Psychological Bulletin. Allport went so far as toclaim that in carrying out a scientific study of personality one should consider thetrait as the simplest element, that it is possible to show a hierarchy among traits,and that it is necessary to represent personality “as a Whole.” In Allport’spsychology, personality is therefore conceived as a structure made up of differentelements that is qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. At the same timepersonality is also seen as a unitary structure, describable as a stratification ofplanes and as the integration of empirically detectable components.

As Nicholson (1996) pointed out, in the articles he published in the 1920s and1930s Allport gradually elaborated the basic notions and constructs developed inhis 1937 book. An analysis of these contributions clearly shows that Allport’swork represents an important junction in psychology: His conception of thediscipline integrates the most important psychological traditions (Lombardo &Foschi, 2002). It was Allport who gave a single scientific dimension to thesetraditions and thus made possible the emergence of a common focus for psycho-logical research on personality. (For this purpose Allport promoted the use ofpersonality instead of character or temperament as an object of study in scientificpsychology). With the institutionalization of personality psychology in Americanpsychology, however, the French roots of the scientific study of personality wereignored, considered as belonging more appropriately to psychopathology ormedical science; the only acknowledged European influences were the Galtonianpsychometric paradigm, personalistic psychology, “understanding” psychology,Gestalt psychology and, finally, psychoanalysis (Nicholson, 1996; Parker, 1991).


Personality and Its Different Contexts

Both Ellenberger’s classic contribution (1970) and Hacking’s more recentwork (1995) follow the development of discoveries on personality along rigorousphilological lines, with particular reference to the French context. Ellenbergerdiscussed personality as a subtopic of dynamic psychiatry, regarding Janet asessentially a doctor, a pupil of Charcot; Hacking, on the other hand, despitedealing with the scientific study of personality as a psychopathological topic,underlined the essential rule of French experimental psychology in the elaborationof the scientific construct of personality. Danziger (1997) asked more resolutelyhow the idea of “personality,” which once belonged to a theological, juridical, orethical context, became a psychological topic. As we already have remarked, hefound in the medicalization of the idea, which took place in 19th-century France,the beginning of a process that tended to differentiate the notion from its previousmeanings and to insert it in the domain of scientific psychology.

This finding is in our opinion somewhat incomplete in supposing that thescientific notion of personality was medicalized only thanks to “certain Frenchdoctors,” underestimating the significance of the fact that Ribot, who was not adoctor, used clinical observations mainly as empirical proof for a renewedfoundation of psychology; furthermore, Ribot’s argument is often rooted inphilosophy rather than in medicine (Brooks, 1998; Guillin, 1998; Nicolas, 2002).Pierre Janet himself, during a conference at Harvard in 1906, noted that Felida’scase was the most important empirical argument supporting the new psychologyagainst spiritualist philosophers and that, had it not been for Felida, it is not clearwhether it would have been possible to establish a chair of experimental psychol-ogy at the College de France (Janet, 1907). The field of personality, from itsorigins, was thus principally a field for confrontation with the spiritualist philos-ophers in order to create a new psychological and “positive” point of view a primeexample of what Carroy and Plas (2000a, p. 238) called the “ambivalent relationsbetween psychology and the philosophical roots of the discipline.”

It is well known that in France, up to the middle of the 20th century, there wasa tradition of university education in psychology according to a philosophical andmedical model that did little to assist the discipline in its struggle for autonomy.It is also true that the French approach to the study of personality, although itunderwent important development in national publications, suffered a kind ofeclipse in an international context. In Allport’s early personality psychology thereare no references to the French experimental tradition. This influenced historiansof psychology, who traced a discontinuity between personality of abnormalpsychology, which refers to French psychological experimentalism, and person-ality in personality psychology. The former was thought to belong to the domainof medical science and psychiatry, the latter to the domain of psychology.Allport’s idea of personality, besides, was defined as a psychology of normal andmature personality (Winter, 1997).

This conception of normality and maturity in Allport’s psychology certainlyhas its roots in Stern’s personalistic psychology. In one of his last and fundamen-tal contributions, Stern (1935/1938) explicitly excluded abnormal psychologyfrom the field of general psychology regarded from the personalistic standpoint.In our opinion, however, Binet’s individual psychology project, born in the


theoretical and methodological context of French experimentalism, was a vitalreference point for Stern’s work; in the 1911 volume Die Differentielle Psycholo-gie in ihren methodischen Grundlagen (Methodological Foundations of Differ-ential Psychology), Binet is the most quoted author, with more than 50 references.We would add that psychologie pathologique already constituted a specificresearch field (different from the psychiatric one) at the first international psy-chology congress (organized by the French in 1889) and that it remained suchuntil the international congresses held in the 1910s.

In 1937, Allport made only one important historical reference that concernsFrance. Allport in fact considered that Franz Joseph Gall’s (1758–1828) psychol-ogy of faculties played a central role in the elaboration of a modern scientificapproach to individuality. Although he referred to various European traditions,Allport seemed to lose sight of the French scientific tradition of the study ofpersonality, which had had a great influence on James. In Allport’s programcertain methodological presuppositions of French psychology are marginalized,such as the use of the pathological method, which for Allport did not have theimportance one encounters in the French tradition. He probably considered theFrench research on personality exclusively “psychopathological” and as such notfully adaptable to his program for the foundation of a psychological discipline.The pathological method, as a matter of fact, is not considered adequate to definepersonality under the domains of general and applied psychology.

Conclusions

In Allport’s conception one can also note the effect of what has been calledthe “enterprise culture” of 20th-century society: American personality psychologychose as its scientific object the individual, perfectly self-conscious and thereforenormal, mature, and responsible. In enterprise cultures, high levels of individualresponsibility and cognitive maturity are required; individuals who do not mea-sure up to these standards are inevitably marginalized, “pathologized,” andexploited and tend to disappear from the cultural point of view as subjects ofknowledge. The techniques, objects, applications, and history of scientific re-search are not immune to the ethical and political pressures at work in the culturein which they exist (Douglas, 1992; Douglas & Ney, 1998; Rose, 1996; see alsoFoucault, 1954, 1987).

In alternative cultures, such as that of early Third Republic France, everyindividual, even the most “bizarre,” is accorded a place in society—perhaps at thelowest level—and thus his or her own “subjectivity.” In this situation it is possiblethat the story of a girl with a discontinuous consciousness may even favor thegrowth of a new academic discipline: experimental psychology (Janet, 1888;Janet, 1907). Felida thus becomes an unconscious protagonist in the “battlebetween the old school and new school, the eclectic spiritualists and the positiv-ists. . . . That humble woman, Felida, was part of the republican armory” (Hack-ing, 1995, p. 165).

As we have noted, personality psychology spread its roots in Americanscience in conjunction with the need for the management and control of historicaland social phenomena, setting “normalization” as a further goal (Parker, 1991;Winter & Barenbaum, 1999). This emphasis on normality, measurement, appli-


cations, and tests led to the predominance of the Galtonian tradition and to therejection of French clinical experimentalism. Although in the hierarchical andpositivistic culture of the Third Republic one could locate the rationale of ascientific subject in the study of abnormal, bizarre, or automatic forms of behav-ior, this was not possible in American enterprise culture in the first half of the 20thcentury, in which the normal, aware, and morally responsible person was con-sidered indispensable (Hacking, 1995; see also Nicholson, 1998). It is as if thescientific tradition inaugurated by Ribot, despite its organizational and popular-izing efforts, was seen by 20th-century American psychologists as poorly repre-sentative and almost irrelevant to the process of constituting the discipline.

In reading the sources, however, one comes across a few important presup-positions that were elaborated in the French psychology of the second half of the19th century and can be found in 20th-century personality psychology.

1. Personality begins to be considered a psychological topic, and the study ofpersonality is considered a specific part of scientific psychology.

2. A scientific vision of individuality that is not exclusively that of the averageman studied through the laboratory, anthropometry, or psychometry is elaborated.

3. Personality takes on the shape of the research structure aimed to describeand empirically evaluate the components of individuality. In this sense, there is aconception of tout de coalition that anticipates 20th-century definitions of per-sonality “as a whole.” There is therefore the beginning of a notion of personalitythat considers different levels of integration of individuality studied through amethodological pluralism.

4. The self (the moi) becomes a central structure of the notion of personalityand begins to be described in both empirical and social terms.

These historiographic elements are intriguing and suggest the necessity offurther research to establish the specific meaning that should be given to thecontinuity and discontinuity between French psychological experimentalism andthe methods, objects, and subdisciplines of 20th-century scientific psychology.

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Received July 30, 2001Revision received April 8, 2002

Accepted June 13, 2002 yy


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The concept of personality in 19th-century French and 20th-century American psychology