ABSTRACT
A sketch has just been given of the way in which the psychologist sees the personality building up from the hereditary raw material interacting with the learning processes imposed by environment. Factor analysis, on the other hand, believes that there are natural, unitary structures in personality and that it is these traits, rather than the endless labels in the dictionary, on which we should concentrate. The psychometrist of personality, if he is to get an unbiased picture of the whole, must have some concept of the totality of human behaviour, which we shall call the personality sphere. For there is an immediate gain in economy alone in that by measuring a certain number of basic source traits we automatically describe a larger area of personality than if we measured the same number of arbitrary variables at random. The meaning of this source trait seems to support the psychoanalytic concept of Ego Strength.
