| Description |
1 online resource (503 pages) illustrations |
| Series |
McGraw-Hill series in psychology |
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McGraw-Hill series in psychology.
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| Summary |
"The systematic study of the whole man is undertaken in two inseparable fields, identified as the psychology of adjustment and the psychology of personality. Adjustment and personality are unifying concepts because they include the various subordinate processes of motivation, emotion, and cognition. To the psychologist of personality, the organization of the subordinate processes is the essence of personality. In Part I, we take up separately the concepts of adjustment and personality. With man so complicated an organism it is not surprising that many schemes would exist for conceptualizing his personality. However, this multitude of schemes also attests to the early stage of our present knowledge, for science normally progresses by dropping poor theories that do not conform to the empirical world and developing more advanced ones that do a better job of encompassing all that is known. Most of the theoretical systems that we are about to explore are products of the early twentieth century, although they all have roots that go far back in the history of ideas. As our knowledge broadens, the present theories will be replaced or modified to keep pace with it. These refinements will be better stated and lead us more successfully to specify the biological and social conditions of life on which personality depends. The theories that we shall explore should be regarded as halting, beginning steps toward understanding personality, taken only recently in a modern science less than one hundred years old. The reader should recognize that theories vary in degree of elaborateness or completeness. They may be in early stages of development with only the most basic postulates available. The second part of the book takes up the historical aspect of personality and adjustment in contrast with contemporaneous descriptions. We began our treatment of personality and adjustment with a discussion of the nature of the concept of adjustment. A key point was the interdependence of processes of adjustment and personality structure. For this reason we proceeded to examine personality, its nature, theories about it, its development, and the biological and social conditions of life that are influential in its formation. Thus in Part III we are prepared to return to the processes of adjustment in the context of this background. Adjustment is conceived as continually occurring in response to internal pressures and environmental demands, but special problems are created for the person when these demands become excessive; when an individual is exposed to conditions of stress. It is therefore of great importance to consider the nature of stress and its implications for the adjustment process. Part IV can be seen as the "pay-off" section, which discusses how the knowledge accumulated about adjustment and personality might be employed to solve some of the pressing psychological problems of mankind. Our objective in the last section on assessment, treatment and other applications is not so much to catalog and detail the areas of application as to outline and assess the problems underlying them. Furthermore, this is not a manual to teach the reader how to diagnose and treat but rather a treatise on the fundamental concepts underlying the methods of assessment and treatment. To some readers the inclusion of these areas of psychological concern, although obviously related to adjustment and personality, may seem specialized and technical. However, nowadays the lay person (including the beginning student as well as those who have had no formal psychological training) is aware of diagnosis and therapy as he has never been before. The mass media frequently touch upon these subjects, and it is in the interest of a high level of education to inform properly the student of psychology about these very fundamental areas of inquiry and application." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved) |
| Analysis |
Adjustment (Psychology) |
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Personality |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references |
| Notes |
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL |
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digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL |
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Print version record |
| In |
PsycBOOKS (EBSCO). EBSCO |
| Subject |
Adjustment (Psychology)
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Personality
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Social psychology.
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Personality
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Psychology, Social
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Emotional Adjustment
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social psychology.
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Social psychology
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Adjustment (Psychology)
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Personality
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Persönlichkeitspsychologie
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Ajustement (psychologie)
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Personnalité.
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| Genre/Form |
Einführung.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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