ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some major ways in which psychology has dealt with values, especially some attempts by psychologists to span the gap between fact and value that rarely seemed to trouble Gordon Allport but has been an enduring obstacle to the development of a psychology. It suggests two subtypes of personal requiredness: superego requiredness and self requiredness. Two of the more ambitious and coherent postures that psychologists have taken toward the realm of values seem to give remarkably little help in pursuing the questions—those of Kohler's Gestalt psychology and of B. F. Skinner's behaviorism. Psychologists have proposed various lists of criteria of positive mental health or of the mature personality, containing such hallmarks as extension of the sense of self; warm relating of self to others; emotional security; realistic perception, skills, and assignments; self-objectification; insight and humor; and a unifying philosophy of life.
