The Organization of Personality

A ll through this book, the reader will have noted that implicitly or explicitly a stand has been taken on a very important theoretical issue. In the field of personality research, as in the more strictly experimental fields of perception and memory, there are two fundamental ways in which we can order our thinking, and along which we can plan our experiments and construct our theories. The first of these is that of atomism or elementalism; the other is that of wholeness or gestalt—the organismic way. The great majority of psychologists who deal with the concept of personality either experimentally or clinically have adopted the organismic point of view; the present book, like its predecessor, takes an outspokenly atomistic, elementalistic point of view. Here and there, throughout this volume, we have taken up this argument with respect to individual issues; now we must come to grips with it on a somewhat more fundamental level.