| Summary: | "In a recent article in the Psychological Review a well-known psychologist pointed out that psychology may be regarded as a Naturwissenschaft (natural science) or as a Geistwissenschaft (mental science). The implication of this statement is that psychology is either a biological discipline depending on the laboratory method of approach or it is a personality-science depending on the clinical method of procedure. This book is an attempt to prove that the science of psychology as it exists today is both, and that the two types of psychology are not necessarily in conflict with each other. This book attempts to do more than that. Realizing that the approach to any subject can not be monopolized by any science, and that the existing sciences are divided not so much by their aims as by their techniques and units of analysis, the author has tried to bring together the contributions of biology, anthropology, sociology, and psychology and weld them together to form a theory of personality which has not, prior to this, appeared in the literature in just this way. This theory is that the ecological, biological, cultural, pre-natal, natal, early post-natal, later post-natal, and the situational (laboratory and clinical) approaches to the study of the individual give us the "major aspects of personality." The book is not so divided as to correspond to these "aspects", but it emphasizes all of them in various connections. In doing so however it does not always defer to traditional conceptions. In this volume the author has opposed the conception which treats race as a unit character and racial groups as biologically determined entities. The author is similarly opposed to the conception that "races can be measured", and that individuals create cultures. Rather does he hold that ecological and cultural processes create both racial and individual types. Individual distinctions, on the other hand, are not the result of "heredity" but of the "ontogenetic stages of development""--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
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