ABSTRACT
ALL that has been said in the first Chapter may perhaps be regarded as fairly orthodox, behaviouristic doctrine; it simply constitutes the application of certain conditioning and learning principles to the abnormal field. In this Chapter we are proposing to introduce the concept of personality, and it will immediately be obvious that here we are departing, to some extent at least, from orthodox behaviourism. Most writers of that school adopt the position that the very notion of personality is unnecessary; considering that all learning proceeds on the orthodox principles of stimulus-response connection formation, they argue that personality, if the term is to be used at all, will simply correspond with the sum total of the person's behaviour. As Watson (1930) once put it quite clearly, personality ‘is the sum of activities that can be discovered by actual observation for a long enough period of time to give reliable information.’ For many behaviourists, therefore, there is no room for personality in a natural science type of psychology.
