The trinity of affinity

personality, consciousness, and psychotherapeutics

pp. 1-17

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

Abstract

One could say that three of the most dreaded plagues in the history of scientific psychology have been conceptions of personality, models of the unconscious, and systems of psychotherapy. They have proven more than a mere inconvenience; they have encroached so much into the domain of the orderly, the logical, and the rational that to the experimentalist they have come to represent a veritable disease. Worse, all three converge in what has come to be referred to as dynamic theories of personality. If the experimentalists actually believe that such concepts even refer to anything real, which most of them do not, the history of such theories has been the perpetual bane of scientific psychology because they represent domains of human experience that are not readily amenable to precise measurement, prediction, and control.