What This Framework Can and Cannot Do

Many students in personality courses think that it is a good idea to be eclectic when it comes to theories. In an effort to challenge that position, I begin the last chapter of my textbook in personality, The Person (McAdams, 1994, p. 794), by quoting the Book of Revelations (3:15-16): "I know all about you: you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were one or the other, but since you are neither, but only lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth." Although the author of Revelations was not thinking about personality psychology, his point is instructive when considering the dangers of easy eclecticism in theorizing about persons. Blend a bit of Freud with a little Bandura and add a dash of existentialism and a pinch of trait theory and you will probably create a tepid and rather tasteless porridge. I heartily agree, therefore, with Loevinger when she suggests, and here I have to switch metaphors, that conflict among different personality theories provides our discipline with a good deal of its elan vital. Singer and Lamiell are both right, too, when they suggest that eclecticism-run-rampant is too nondiscriminating to advance a scientific field. Lamiell and Weigert quote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) when he likens eclecticism to the jackdaw's propensity to drag anything and everything into the nest. But theoretical parochialism can be just as bad. With all due respect to the great (but pre-Darwinian) Goethe, the jackdaw does not drag everything and anything into the nest. Some things simply cannot be dragged. Others might threaten the jackdaw's survival. And evolution has accentuated the likelihood that the jackdaw will drag in pretty much what she needs in order to assure her reproductive fitness and the viability of her progeny. Likewise, good theories and frameworks "drag" in only what they need to build a useful, sensible, and generative conceptual product. In building this conceptual framework, I have drawn widely from many different viewpoints in order to consider what a comprehensive description of human individuality in modern societies should entail. Although Lamiell and Weigert believe I have sampled too broadly, Mayer suggests I have left too much out. In my view, I have offered a wide-ranging but eminently coherent framework-in-progresssomewhere between parochialism and the most promiscuous forms of eclecticism. In Hermans's terms, I have sought to provide a centripetal force in an intellectual environment that has experienced too much of the centrifugal in recent years. My framework offers a conceptual space wherein the conflicting theories and the different constructs that are regularly invoked by personality psychologists to describe human individuality can, as Loevinger would wish, do battle. The space offers some common language and clarifying distinctions that may lead to ever more fruitful "conflicts" in the future. I should add, furthermore, that there is nothing like writing a textbook in personality psychology to make you at least a little more eclectic than you were before. In studying carefully the works of others, you come to realize that they were not as stupid as you originally thought. In this regard, the field owes Lamiell a debt of gratitude for resurrecting William Stern (1871-1938). Stern is surely one of the forgotten men in the history of personality psychology. But one should note that there are other forgotten or underappreciated men and women, as well-McDougall, Prince, Roback, Stagner, Clara Thompson, and Robert White, to name a few. It