Daniel Geary. Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009. 277 pp. $29.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-520-25836-5
✍ Scribed by David W. Park
- Book ID
- 102340135
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2010
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 97 KB
- Volume
- 46
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In my undergraduate history of psychology seminar, I help students identify three types of historical thinking-descriptions, explanations, and implications. If the first two address what happened and why, the third tries to get at the "so what" question: what might a specific analysis tell us about the ways in which psychology and history shape each other over time? Eugene Taylor's The Mystery of Personality: A History of Psychodynamic Theories is a volume that is heavy in its description and explanation, but also offers some interesting possibilities regarding what it means to understand persons.
As an established and well-respected authority on William James and late-nineteenthcentury American psychology, Taylor casts the history of modern personality theories through the lens of "three streams" or traditions-experimental (academic laboratory psychologies), clinical (person-centered psychologies), and experiential (psychospiritual folk psychologies). While most histories of psychology treat personality solely in the context of the clinical stream, his narrative embodies the dynamic feel of its subject by constantly stressing the interplay among the three streams. For example, a major theme of The Mystery of Personality is the tension created by varying conceptions of science that individuals seeking to understand personality assume. Positivistic experimentalists, interpretive psychoanalysts, and spiritualistic seekers each contribute in Taylor's broad treatment of psychology's exploration of the person.
Inverting the priorities found in standard history of psychology texts, Taylor shows that modern, scientific studies of personality modeled after German laboratory psychology emerge two to three decades after physicians and psychical researchers have made significant contributions to understanding the coherence and malleability of personality. Important also is his distillation and clarification of conceptions of the unconscious and mind-body relations that predate Freud. As his story moves from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, psychodynamic approaches to personality take center stage and represent, in ways, the confluence of the three streams into a struggle to articulate a personally, and perhaps transcendently, meaningful science of the person. A real contribution of this book is Taylor's detailed treatment of dozens of contributors-some well known, others not-to the development of dynamically and humanistically oriented theories of personality. Although at times depth is sacrificed for breadth (e.g., Taylor's limited treatment of Harry Stack Sullivan), his ability to interconnect the influences of experimental psychiatry, existential philosophy, and early gender psychology bring to light individuals and movements that are ripe for further historical examination.
Given Taylor's previous work, it is not surprising that spirituality and religion-including Western, Eastern, and other indigenous traditions-consistently shape psychology's understanding of what being a person means in The Mystery of Personality. The third stream is shown to exert its historical influence in a variety of ways, via cultural moralities of personal fulfillment, the deep symbolism of Jungian archetypes, and the expansiveness of esoteric and mind-altering experiences. As a champion of freeing the history of psychology from the narrow confines of the academic experimental tradition, Taylor succeeds in connecting it to something broader than itself by focusing on the interplay of what is typically taken to be the border between science and non-science.