ABSTRACT

The title of this volume, Toward a Psychology of Persons, suggests an underlying optimism regarding the possibility of reframing psychology's project to bring the individual back into psychological discourse. There appears to be an implicit sense that studying this topic can, perhaps, lead to new understandings of the person that would do greater justice to the subject than is currently evident in mainstream psychology. For the most part, this optimism appears to have been warranted. In this volume, we find proposals to relocate the explanatory action to the social world from its currently privileged intrapsychic locus (see Tolman, chap. 1; Smythe, chap. 2; House & McDonald, chap. 8; Shotter, chap. 10). We also find suggestions that detailed explorations of nonlinguistic phenomena may provide a means of escaping the current metatheoretical straightjacket that has resulted in ejecting the person from psychological theory and discourse (e.g., Kuiken, chap. 5; Conway, chap. 6). Constraints on possible changes are also articulated (Stam, chap. 9). Despite its form, the need for change has remained constant throughout the evolution of this volume.