ABSTRACT
In teaching an upper-level undergraduate course in personality theory, the author have wrestled with the discrepancy between the excitement he felt about theories and the insights they offered about myself and people in his life, on the one hand, and the much more abstract and lifeless version of the field that students seemed to be getting from the textbook. An experimental component was needed an intellectual laboratory. Textbook abstractions are only a convenient summary of the concepts of a discipline whose value and truth cannot be established except in application. Introspective exercises and journals were a possibility and the author had used them with success in an elective course on "The Self". But such introspective devices are less suitable for a personality theory course, because many personality theories are centrally concerned with the issue of mal-adjustment, and self-diagnosis in the context of the classroom raises ethical dilemmas.
