Psychodynamics, Gestalt psychology, and personality theory at Harvard

pp. 179-222

in: Eugene Taylor, The mystery of personality, Berlin, Springer, 2009

Abstract

For almost half a century, from the day Edwin G. Boring first walked into the halls at Harvard to assume his teaching duties in 1921, to the day that he died in 1967 in Stillman Infirmary, the status and relevance of dynamic theories of personality as a legitimate science played a central role in defining what was even allowed to be called psychology at the University. Boring was against the molar, the psychodynamic, and a science that was person centered because he judged them to be unscientific and he spent his entire career defending that principle. What hung in the balance, insofar as Harvard contributes to the gold standard of what happens in institutions of higher learning in the West, was the more ethereal fate of such theories in the academy and in the wider discipline of psychology at large, both nationally and internationally, influencing their status, then as today.