Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [200]
* Gestalt psychology is often confused with Gestalt therapy. The former is a theory of psychology; the latter, a technique of psychotherapy that uses a few key concepts borrowed from the psychology, but greatly altered in meaning, plus notions drawn from depth psychologies and existentialism.
* Plural form of Gestalt; used more often in psychological writing than the Anglicized “gestalts.”
* Wertheimer wrote up few of his experiments, but most of them are briefly noted in Koffka’s Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935).
ELEVEN
The Personality
Psychologists
“The Secrets of the Hearts of Other Men”
The nature and origin of personality has long been an issue of paramount importance to psychologists. For them the question, central to understanding human nature, is: What accounts for the differences in the characteristics of individuals and in their behavior? The same issue is of the greatest interest to laypersons. For them the question, of crucial importance in everyday life, is: How can one best judge other people’s characters and know what to expect of them?
Clearly, what people say is not a reliable source of information; human beings, alone among living species, are able to lie, and often do. Nor can one depend on their gestures and expressions; people can dissemble, some expertly. Not even their deeds always reveal the truth; people can practice deception until at some critical juncture they reveal the real self. Yet whoever the other person is—the one we are thinking of marrying, the potential buyer of our house, the leader of an enemy nation (or our own)—nothing could be more valuable than to be able to make a sound judgment as to what that person is really like and how he or she is apt to behave.
For such reasons, the study of personality has been a leading interest of both the philosopher and Everyman throughout recorded history and one of the most important fields of modern psychology for the past seven decades.
The earliest known efforts to appraise personality relied on the pseudo-science of astrology. From the tenth century B.C. on, Babylonian astrologers had predicted wars and natural disasters on the basis of the positions of the planets, and by the fifth century B.C. Greek astrologers were using these data to interpret the personality and forecast the future of individual clients. The notion that the positions of the planets at the time of one’s birth influence one’s personality and fate had great appeal in that scientifically näive time; oddly, it still does, even though modern astronomy and the behavioral sciences show it to be a baseless superstition.
Physiognomy, mentioned earlier, was another fictive system for spying out the hidden terrain of personality. Unlike astrology, the idea that facial traits are clues to the inner person has some psychological validity; how we look surely plays a part in how we feel about ourselves. But Hippocrates, Pythagoras, and other physiognomists did not perceive this relationship; instead, they compiled lists of fanciful connections between particular facial characteristics and traits of character. Even the great Aristotle asserted that “persons who have a large forehead are sluggish, those who have a small one, fickle; those who have a broad one are excitable, those who have a bulging one, quick-tempered.”1
Like astrology, physiognomy has endured. The sophisticated Romans believed in it: Cicero asserted, “The face is the image of the soul” and Julius Caesar said, “I am not much in fear of these fat, sleek fellows, but rather of those pale, thin ones.” (Caesar’s view is best known in Shake-speare’s version: “Let me have men about me that are fat; / Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights; / Yond Cassius hath a lean and hungry look; / He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”) Jesus’ actual looks are