Explorations in personality
by the late Henry A. Murray
Category: Psychology

Explorations in Personality, published by OUP in 1938, established an elaborate agenda for understanding our subjective human nature that is as relevant to students of personality psychology today as it was to its audience then. An antidote to the now fashionable strategy of representing a person as a dot on a scatter plot or burying the individual in an amalgam of statistics, it advocates 'whole person' research and bubbles with suggestions about how to perform such studies. IN addition, it actually executes with empirical and experimental rigor and ingenuity the kind of detailed, engrossing case study approach it recommends, recounting the results of a three-year long study of fifty college-age individuals. This book is, in short, a classic. This reissue, enhanced by Dan McAdams' foreword, which will provide a contemporary evaluation of Murray's achievement, will thus be of great interest to students and researchers in personality psychology in general, and personologists in particular.