The Productive Personality

A different direction was initiated, particularly in the divisions of counseling and clinical psychology, with the advent of Maslow's important findings on the self-actualizing personality in the late 1940's. This work, as well as subsequent contributions by Gordon Allport, Rollo May, Anne Roe, Frank Barron and Erich Fromm, along with Erik H. Erikson's well known treatise on the Growth and Crisis in the Healthy Personality , turned our interest more toward the achieving, mentally healthy personality. In the 1950 's psychiatry also began to re-examine its thinking regarding mental illness. Harry Stack Sullivan urged a more thorough consideration of the social and environmental influences as possible causative factors. Karen Horney was of the same opinion. In 1955 the United States Congress under the Mental Health Study Act of 1955 appropriated funds for a Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health as part of the National Mental Health Survey. Their report summarized the theoretical findings on characteristics of the healthy personality as well as the social, educational, economic and other factors involved in mental illness and mental health.