IAN A. M. NICHOLSON Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and Science of Selfhood Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003, 288 pages (ISBN 1-55798-929-X, US$39.95 Hardcover) Reviewed by ROBERT GIFFORD Gordon Allport was not what he appeared. Of course, to me as graduate student who was required to read his classic handbook chapter on history of social psychology, he merely appeared as an eminence grise from past, without body or soul. Ian A. M. Nicholson's masterful new half-biography (the book, unfortunately, covers only first half of Allport's career, to 1938) certainly fills in complexity of Allport's soul. Of his body, I am less sure. For someone who later achieved justifiable status as person who was most responsible for legitimizing scientific study of personality, Allport's early life was filled with unusual self-doubt. As child, he felt feminine and weak compared to his muscular older brothers, including Floyd, who of course attained stature as leading psychologist himself. The four Allport brothers were raised by strong-willed physician and his missionary-oriented wife in small-town Ohio. From an early age, Gordon rejected boy culture in favour of softer pursuits. As young man, he had such close relationships with other men, including bare bodies churning limpid waters during starlight swims, lusty singing, and rowing in beautiful, secluded spots, that modern observer would certainly wonder about his sexual orientation. Nicholson concludes that Allport was engaging in manly love typical of time, in which very close relations between men remained asexual. The tender side of Allport was relevant to his career and accomplishments. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that Allport's devotion to personality as research topic was, at that time, sublimation of his tender personality in face of tough experimentalism trumpeted in United States at that time by Floyd Allport and many others. Voyages of academic and personal discovery to Germany, then important but declining centre of psychology, were both inspiring and horrifying: Allport encountered closed ranks of stiff authoritarian men in heavy dark suits, conspicuously flicking their de rigriew cigars, yet was entranced by their advocacy of much more holistic approach to psychology. The great added value of Nicholson's book is that it is not mere biography of Allport, but an ambitious foray into zeigtgeist of in early part of last century. Whether they were for (Americans) or against (Germans) psychology of elements, virtually all-male coteries struggled to make respectable. In process, they (if you will) masculated psychology. Nicholson paints full-colour canvas of most important figures of day, such as William Stern and Eduard Spranger, advocates of view of that emphasized larger, more holistic vision that included the unity of personality, purpose and Kultur, and believed that study of basic psychological elements was nothing more than a small and relatively insignificant corner of domain. One wonders what Stern, Spranger, and - as someone strongly influenced by them - Allport himself, would think about near-hegemonic position of cognitive today, successor to old psychology of elements. But in those days, German had such prestige that North American students had fetish about it, according to David Leary, historian, because training in Germany could confer an important status in North American job market of day. …