Create a Reading List and include this title. Select Add to Reading List on the right.
“[Personology] is fascinating reading. . . . It sheds valuable new light on Freud, and Jung, and their relationship, and brilliantly explores a number of central issues in the life of Harry Stack Sullivan. Its outline of methodological guidelines in personality assessment and psychobiography in Chapter 1 is an outstanding summary of a lifetime of guides to clinical inference . . . . It does more than any book I know of in relating general principles of personality assessment to the study of individual lives and the field of psychobiography.”—William McKinley Runyon
“A splendid book. . . . It will be immediately recognized as a leading example of scholarship in this vein, unique in providing explicit guidelines on how to do it, and valuable examples of how it is done. . . . [This work] stands alone in its close intensive look at three of the greatest originators, Freud, Jung, and Sullivan.”—M. Brewster Smith
If you are requesting permission to photocopy material for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at copyright.com;
If the Copyright Clearance Center cannot grant permission, you may request permission from our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).
If you are requesting permission to reprint DUP material (journal or book selection) in another book or in any other format, contact our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).
Many images/art used in material copyrighted by Duke University Press are controlled, not by the Press, but by the owner of the image. Please check the credit line adjacent to the illustration, as well as the front and back matter of the book for a list of credits. You must obtain permission directly from the owner of the image. Occasionally, Duke University Press controls the rights to maps or other drawings. Please direct permission requests for these images to permissions@dukeupress.edu.
For book covers to accompany reviews, please contact the publicity department.
If you're interested in a Duke University Press book for subsidiary rights/translations, please contact permissions@dukeupress.edu. Include the book title/author, rights sought, and estimated print run.
Instructions for requesting an electronic text on behalf of a student with disabilities are available here.
How can we know what another human being is like in some meaningful, dynamic way? Can we distill the signature-like features of an individual personality? What is the relationship between personal experience and our attempts to describe the person who has that experience?
This work by a highly respected senior psychologist is an effort to answer these questions. Irving E. Alexander presents a case for considering the personal narrative of a human life as the most compelling aspect of that life to be decoded and understood. In part a critique of an exclusive reliance on general theories about the development of personality and ways of knowing based primarily on comparison with others, Personology is illustrated with material drawn from the lives, personal writings, and theories of Freud, Jung, and Sullivan. Alexander develops new insights into the lives of these men and offers methods and guidelines for investigating and teaching personology and psychobiography.