Psychiatry and Psychopathology

The term “personality” appeared rarely in the general psychological literature before the
second decade of the twentieth century, and during the first decade it “typically had a
colloquial meaning that was synonymous with ‘soul’ or ‘self’” (Parker, 1991, p. 40).
Between 1910 and 1920, however, it began to appear in discussions of “psychiatric and
abnormal psychology topics” (p. 42) and in reviews of books on psychoanalysis
(Parker’s observations are based on a survey of articles in the Psychological Bulletin
and the Psychological Review between 1900 and 1920). It is important to remember
that during this period, abnormal and clinical psychology were not central areas of
academic psychology, as they are today. Some American psychologists were interested
in psychopathology and psychotherapy (Hale, 1971; Taylor, 1996, 2000); one notable
example isWilliam James, who was trained in medicine and taught a course in
psychopathology at Harvard beginning in 1893 (Taylor, 1996). (Woodworth, 1932,
mentions having taken James’s course as a graduate student.) In general, however,
abnormal psychology was considered to be a medical subfield rather than an area of
psychology, and the profession of clinical psychology was still in its infancy (see the
chapter by Benjamin, DeLeon, &Freedheim in this volume; Napoli, 1981).

“Personality” appeared early as a topic of psychiatry and abnormal psychology in

publications such as the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, founded in 1906 by Morton
Prince, “eminent Boston physician and lecturer at Tufts College Medical School” (G. W.
Allport, 1938, p. 3). For several years, the editorial board of the journal consisted
entirely of persons with medical training; only Hugo Münsterberg and Boris Sidis were
also trained in psychology (Shermer, 1985). Prince was a leading figure in the “Boston
school” of psychopathology and psychotherapy (Hale, 1971), a group composed
primarily of physicians, some of whom were also trained in experimental psychology
(Taylor, 2000). The Boston psychopathologists were among the first professionals to be
influenced by psychoanalysis (Fancher, 2000; Hale, 1971); indeed, the first issue of the
Journal of Abnormal Psychology contained an article on psychoanalysis (Putnam,
1906). Between 1910 and 1925 the journal served as the official organ of the American
Psychopathological Association (G. W. Allport, 1938), which consisted of physicians
and psychologists
with an interest in psychotherapy (Hale, 1971).

Between 1906 and 1920, the Journal of Abnormal Psychology featured more articles on
“personality” than any other psychological journal. (This statement is based on a count
of items in the historic PsycINFO database featuring the term “personality” in titles or
abstracts.) In 1921, the journal was expanded to include a focus on social psychology
and was renamed The Journal of Abnormal Psychology and
Social Psychology; the editorial announcing this change pointed to “personality” as a
central topic in both fields (Editors, 1921). Although Prince remained the nominal editor,
he soon transferred most of the editorial responsibility for the journal to his new
“Coöperating Editor,” social psychologist Floyd Allport. In 1925, the journal was
renamed The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (G. W. Allport, 1938); in
1960, it became Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. In 1965, the journal split
into the Journal of Abnormal Psychology and the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology.

Articles on personality in early issues of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology bore such
titles as “My Life as a Dissociated Personality” (Anonymous, 1908) and “A Case of
Disordered Personality” (Dewey, 1907), indicating their reliance on personal accounts
and case studies. Between 1906 and 1916, nearly all of the empirical studies published
in the journal presented data on individuals rather than groups. Although the proportion
of group studies began to increase during the second decade of publication, the
proportion of individual studies remained higher until 1925, averaging 75% during
Prince’s last four years as active editor and 65% during Floyd Allport’s term as
cooperating editor (see Shermer, 1985; we discuss in a later section a change in
publication trends beginning in 1925). This emphasis on case studies reflected the
investigative practices of medical and psychiatric researchers and psychoanalysts.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the case study, familiar to medical practitioners
since the days of Hippocrates, had been introduced as a pedagogical tool by Walter B.
Cannon (1900; see Forrester, 1996; Taylor, 1996) and by Richard C. Cabot (see
Forrester, 1996; Lubove, 1965), borrowing from law and from social casework,
respectively. Case studies were of course central in psychoanalysis; a clear example is
Freud’s (1910/1957a) discussion of the case of “Anna O.” in his first lecture in the
United States in 1909. Case studies appeared regularly in psychiatric and
psychoanalytic journals such as the American Journal of Psychiatryand the
Psychoanalytic Review throughout the 1920s.

Sociology and Social Work

Sociologists also contributed to the personality literature during the early decades of the
twentieth century (Barenbaum, 2000; Becker, 1930) and maintained an active interest in
personality thereafter (Bernard, 1945). Their contributions have received little
systematic attention in historical discussions of personality psychology. (For exceptions,
see Burnham, 1968a, on the influence of sociology and social philosophy on the
development of personality psychology; Runyan, 1982, on sociological contributions to
the study of life histories; and Smith, 1997, on personality research as a focus
ofsociological and psychological social psychologists during the 1930s.)

The adoption in 1921 of a system for classifying abstracts of recent literature published
in the American Journal of Sociology was one indication of sociologists’ interest in
personality. The “tentative scheme” included as a first category “Personality: The
Individual and the Person” (“Recent Literature,” 1921, p. 128; in contrast, the
Psychological Index and Psychological Abstracts did not include “personality” in their
classification schemes until 1929 and 1934, respectively). A subcategory for
“Biography” (p. 128) as well as the category “Social Pathology: Personal and Social
Disorganization” and two methodological subcategories, “Case Studies and Social
Diagnosis” and “Life-Histories and Psychoanalysis” (p. 129), reflected sociologists’
attention to studies of individual lives, an interest they shared with social workers,
psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts.

Case study and life history methods, including the use of personal documents, drew
attention in sociology following the publication of Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1918–1920)
landmark study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, which was based on
letters and autobiographical material. Promoting the use of empirical methods, the study
served as a model for sociologists at the University of Chicago, the most influential
institution in sociology in the 1920s and 1930s (Bulmer, 1984). Following Thomas’s
departure from Chicago in 1918, other prominent members of the sociology department,
including Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, Clifford R. Shaw, and Herbert Blumer,
continued to promote case studies and life histories (Bulmer, 1984), extending their
influence through the Social Science Research Council (SSRC); we discuss these
developments in a later section. Examples of works by Chicago sociologists include
Shaw’s (1930) The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story and Krueger’s (1925)
dissertation on autobiographical documents and personality.

A debate concerning the relative merits of case study and statistical methods during this
period reflected sociologists’ growing interest in quantitative methods, partly a result of
their collaboration with researchers in neighboring disciplines, such as economics and
psychology. Psychologist L. L. Thurstone, for example, was an important influence on
such sociologists as Samuel Stouffer (1930), who became a proponent
of statistical methods in sociology (Bulmer, 1984). The debate was a frequent topic of
meetings of the Society for Social Research, an “integral part” of the Chicago sociology
department composed of faculty and graduate students engaged in serious research (p.
114). Although Chicago sociologists were at the center of the debate, those at other
institutions also participated (see, e.g., Bain, 1929; Lundberg, 1926).

According to Platt, the debate was a “hot” issue from the 1920s until the Second World
War (1996, p. 36; see also Ross, 1991). During the 1930s, members of the Chicago
sociology department demonstrated their allegiance to one method or the other at their
student-faculty picnic, “where baseball sides were picked on the basis of case study
versus statistics” (Platt, 1996, pp. 45–46). Bulmer (1984) notes, however, that an
“emphasis on the complementarity of research methods was characteristic of the
Chicago school” (p. 121) and that several participants in the debate actually advocated
the use of both approaches. During this period many sociologists hoped to discover
general laws by comparing and classifying individual cases, and this view eventually
contributed to a blurring of the distinction between case study and statistical methods
(Platt, 1992). Burgess (1927) compared sociologists’ increasing interest in quantitative
methods with psychologists’ “heroic efforts to become more scientific, that is to say,
statistical” (p. 108); in contrast, he noted that social workers and psychiatrists had
introduced the case study method into social science. Sociologists’ use of case studies
was derived in part from the close connection between sociology and social work:

Sociology and social work took a long time to become disentangled; in the 1920s
people called social workers were equally or even more likely to carry out empirical
research, and university sociologists very frequently drew on their case data whether or
not it had been collected for research purposes. (Platt, 1996, p. 46)

Social workers’ interest in personality during this period is illustrated by social work
theorist Mary Richmond’s insistence that the “one central idea” of social casework was
“the development of personality” (1922, p. 90). Richmond and other social workers (e.g.,
Sheffield, 1920) wrote influential works on case study methods.

In the sociological literature of this period, the term “case study” referred not only to the
number of cases and the intensiveness with which they were studied but also to a
“special kind” of data (Platt, 1996, p. 46). “Case study” was often used interchangeably
with “life history” and “personal documents”; these methods were seen as giving
“access to the subjects’ personal meanings, while alternatives [were] seen as dry,
narrow and giving access only to external data” (p. 46). Exemplifying this usage,
sociologist John Dollard
applied his Criteria for the Life History (1935) to several different types of “life history,”
defined as “an autobiography, biography or clinical history” or “even a social service
case history or a psychiatric document” (p. 265). Dollard’s work also reflected
sociologists’ interest in refining and standardizing case methods.

The Mental Hygiene Movement

Inspired by a case study—the autobiography of a former patient (Beers, 1908)—the

mental hygiene movement was organized in 1909 to reform the treatment of patients in
mental institutions. The movement soon became a powerful coalition of psychiatrists,
educators, and social workers who attributed various social and personal problems to
individual maladjustment (see Cohen, 1983; Danziger, 1990, 1997; Lubove, 1965;
Parker, 1991). Expanding their goals to include the identification of potential cases of
maladjustment, mental hygiene workers made “personality” the focus of their preventive
and therapeutic efforts, which frequently involved interdisciplinary teams of experts
undertaking intensive case
studies of “troublesome” children in settings such as child guidance clinics (W. Healy,
1915; Jones, 1999). Psychiatrists typically screened clients for medical disorders and
conducted psychotherapy, and social workers contributed case histories based on their
investigations of clients and their families. Psychologists’ role in these interdisciplinary
teams “generally came down to the construction and application of scales that would
subject ‘personality’ to the rigors of measurement and so convert it from merely an
object of social intervention to an object of science” (Danziger, 1990, p. 164). The
movement thus supported psychologists as purveyors of expert scientific knowledge of
personality in the form of test
scores.