“What is Man, Psychologist, that Thou Art So Unmindful of him?”: Henry A. Murray on the Historical Relation between Classical Personality Theory and Humanistic Psychology

Abstract

A review is presented of the humanistic movement in American psychology, focusing on recent historical reconstruction of the Old Saybrook Conference, held in November 1964. At that conference, senior academic personality theorists such as Gordon Allport, Henry A. Murray, Gardner Murphy, and George Kelly convened with the new voices of the humanistic movement, including Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, James Bugental, and Charlotte Bühler, to self-consciously legitimize humanistic psychology as a viable form of intellectual discourse within academic psychology. This article focuses on the historical reconstruction of the previously lost and unpublished keynote address delivered by Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray. In this address, Murray excoriates the destructive reductionism of the laboratory experimentalists, lays out the lines of a definitive historical relationship between classical personality theory and the new humanistic psychology, and defines eight areas to be developed to solidify the movement at the leading edge of American psychology.