The focus of this theory is upon individuals in all their complexity. This point of view is highlighted by the term "Personology" which Murray and collaborators introduced as a label for his own efforts and those of others who were primarily concerned with a full understanding of the individual case. He emphasized consistently the organic quality of behaviour, indicating that a single segment of behaviour is not to be understood in isolation from the rest of the functioning person. He insisted that the environment context of behaviour must be thoroughly understood and analyzed before an adequate account of individual behaviour is possible. His theory shares with psychoanalysis the assumption that events taking place in infancy and childhood are criminal determinants of adult behaviour. A further similarity lies in the importance attributed to unconscious motivation and the deep interest displayed in the subjective or free, verbal report of individual, including imaginative productions.
The most distinctive features of this theory are its highly differential and carefully specified treatment of motivation. Another unusual feature of the theory is the consistent emphasis upon the existing and functionally linked physiological processes that accompany all psychological processes.
Personal history
Henry Murray was born in New York city on May 13, 1893, and received his education at Groton school and Harvard college, securing his A.B in 1915 with a major in history. His initial interest in psychology was squelched by the first lecture in Hugo Munsterbeg's introducing class. Later he enrolled in the Columbia college of physicians and surgeon where he graduated in 1919. In 1920 he received on M.A in Biology from Columbia. He served a two year surgical internship at Presbyterian Hospital in New York. He studied at Cambridge Univerity where he conducted biochemical research that led to his receiving a PhD in biochemistry from Cambridge in 1927.
In 1923 Murray chance upon Carl Jung's "Psychological types", in a bookstore on the day when it became available in the United States. He immersed himself in the book and other works of Jung and Freud Murray became so involved in the depth psychology that he wrote to Jung in 1924, requesting an opportunity to visit. In 1923, he spend there weeks in Zuirch with Jung during his easter vacation from Cambridge. Thus deeply interested in psychology, Murray returned to his country. In 1927 he accepted an invitation to come to Harvard University as an instruction in psychology. In 1928, Murray was made an assistant professor and in 1937 he was made as Associate professor Murray was one of the founding members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and 1935 had completed his training in psychoanalysis under Franz Alexander and Hans Sachs. Here at the Clinic, for the first time, psychoanalytic theory was given a serious academic audience and earnest efforts were made to device means of translating the brilliant clinical insights of Freud into experimental orientations that would permit some degree of empirical confirmation or rejection.
Murray has been awarded the distinguished scientific contribution award of the American Psychologival association and the gold medal award of the American psychological foundation for a lifetime or contribution to the field. He died of pneumonia on June 13, 1988 at the age of 95.
Structure of Personality
Definition of personality
- An individual's personality is an abstraction formulated by a theorist and not merely a description of the individual behaviour.
- An individual personality free to a series of events that ideally span the person life time "The history of personality is the personality".
- A definition of personality should reflect the enduring and receiving elements of behaviour as well as the novel and unique.
- Personality is the organizing and governing agent of the individual. Its functions are to integrate the conflicts and constraints to which the individual is exposed to satisfy the individual's needs and to make plans of the attainment of future goals.
- Personality is located in the brain. "No Brain, No Personality"
Murray's attempts at a definition of personality make clear that the was strongly oriented toward a view that gives adequate weight to the history of the organization, to the organizing function of personality, to the recurrent and novel features of the individuals behaviour, to the abstract or conceptual nature of personality and to physiological processes underlying the psychological.
Proceeding and Serials: The basic data of the psychologist are proceedings, which are subject-object interactions, or subject-subject interactions, of sufficient duration to include the significant elements of any given behavioural sequence. Although in certain settings, it is possible to define a proceeding exactly.
The proceeding is a compromise between practical limitations imposed by he intellect and techniques of the investigators and the empirical given that behaviour exists in a time dimension. Proceedings can be classified in terms of whatever they are internal, (daydreaming, problem solving, planning in solitude) or external (interacting with persons or objects in the environment External proceedings have two aspects a subjective experimental aspect and an objective behavioural aspect.
For many purposes the representation of behaviour in terms of proceedings is perfectly adequate. However under some circumstances it is necessary to include in a single unit of formulation behaviour taking place over a longer period of time. This longer functional unit of behaviour is referred to as a serial. A directionally organized intermittent succession of proceedings may be called a serial. No one proceeding in the serial can be understood without reference to those which have led up to it and without reference to the persons aims and expectations, his design for the future. Representation of behaviour in terms of serials is made necessary because certain proceedings are so intimately related to one another that it is impossible to study them separately without destroying their fully meaning.
Serial programs and Schedule: Serial programs are orderly arrangements of sub goals that stretch into the future perhaps for month or years, and if ally goals well, until lead eventually to some designed and state. Thus, the individual aspires to becoming a medical doctor, but intervening between the present situation and his goal are years of study and special training. If he or she develops a set of sub goals, each of which play a part in bringing the person closer to their medical degree, this would be referred to as a serial program.
Schedule represents devices for reducting conflict among competing needs and goods by arranging for expansion of these tendencies at different times.
Murray subsumed serial programs and schedules under the term ordination, which includes the process of plan making as well as the outcome of the process. Ordination is a higher mental process on the same level as cognition.
Abilities and Achievements: these qualities are of the individual serve a central function in mediating between dispositions to action and the end results toward which their dispositions are essential.
Establishments of Personality: Murray agreed with Freud in conceiving of the id as the repository of primitive and unacceptable impulses that are acceptable to the self and society. Not only does the id contain impulses toward both good and evil but the strength of these tendencies varies in individuals. The id consist of all the basic energies emotions and needs of the personality, some of which are wholly acceptable and some wholly unacceptable but most of which are acceptable when expressed in a culturally approved form, towards culturally approval form, towards culturally approval object, in a cultural approval time. Thus the function of the ego is not to suppress the instinctual needs but to tovern them by modernity their intensities and determining the modes and times of their fulfillment. The strength and effectiveness of the ego is an important determinant of the individual's adjustment.
The super ego is considered to be a cultural implant. It is an internalized subsystem that acts within the individual to regulate behaviour in the some manner those agents outside the individual once acted. These agents, parents and others, act as internalizing their culture prescriptions. The super ego, develops in strata, ranging from crude infantile representation to a rational ordering of ethical principles. Therefore, conflict may exist within the superego itself.
The ego ideal is an idealized picture of the self-an aspired self, or a set f personal ambitious toward which the individual strives. The ego-ideal may be entirely divorced from the superego, as in the case of a person who aspires to be a master criminal, so that the individual moves towards personal ambitious in a manner conforming with the sanctions of the dominant and the ego-ideal is suppressed, the person may attempt of serve "gods will" or the "welfare of the society" at the expense of giving up all personal ambition.
Murray also stressed that there are formulative and constructive process that are not only useful for survival or as defenses against anxiety, but that have their own energies, goals and fulfillments. A person needs to be creative and imaginative, if he or she is to remain psychologically healthy.
Dynamics of personality
Need: A need is a construct which stands for force, in the brain region. A force which organized perception, apperception, intellection, conation, and action in such a way as to transform in a unsatisfying situation. A need is sometimes provoked directly by internal process of certain kind, but more frequently by the occurence of one of a few commonly effective environment forces. Thus, it manifests itself by leading the organism to avoid encountering or when encountered, to attend and respond to certain kinds of environment forces. A particular feeling or emotion characteristically accompanies each need. It may be weak or intense, monetary or enduring. But usually it persists and give rise to overt behaviour, which changes the initiating circumstances in such a way as to bring about an end situation which still, appears or satisfies, the organism. The existence of a need can be inferred on the basis of
- The effect or end result of the behaviour
- The particular pattern or mode of behaviour involved
- The selective attention and response to a particular class of stimulus objects.
- The expression of a particular emotion and
- The expression of satisfaction or disappointment.
Murray arrived at a list of twenty needs. These are:
- Abasement: to submit passion by to extend force
- Affiliation: to draw nean
- Aggression: to fight, to avenge
- Autonomy: to get free
- Counter action: to make up for a failure
- Defendance: to defend against assault
- Deference: to admire and support a suspension
- Dominance: to control and human environment
- Exhibition: to make an impression
- Harm avoidance: to avoid pain
- Infavoidance: to give sympathy and care
- Nurturance: to give sympathy and care
- Order: to put things in order
- Play: to act for fun
- Rejection: to separate oneself from a negatively cathected object
- Sentinence: to seek a and enjoy sensuous impressions
- Sex: to have sexual intercourse
- Succorance: to have one's need gratified
- To be nursed or have a supporter
- Understanding: to speculate, formulate analyze and generate
The above ones are twenty needs listed out by Murray.
Development of Personality
Infantile Complexes: Murray defined five types of complexes: claustral, oral, and urethral castration.
Claustral Complexes: These represent residents of prenatal experiments of the individual. There are three specific types of claustral complex
- Simple Claustral: simple claustral complex a wish to reinstate the conditions similar to these previously before birth. The individual is characterized by cathexies womb like conditions, nurturing or motherly objects, death, the past and resistance to change, needs for passivity, harm avoidance, sechision and succorance. The overall picture is of a passive, dependent person who is oriented toward the past and generally resistant to novelty or change.
- In support complex manifest itself in fear of open spaces, failing, drowning, earthquake, fire family insupport
- Eagerness complex is concerned with escaping or departing and displays itself in cathexis for open spaces and a strong need for anatomy.
The oral complexes represent derivatives of early feeding experience. Murray defined three specific sub complexes
- The oral succorance complex which involves oral activity in combination with passive and dependent tendencies. The existence of this complex can be inferred from activities such as sucking, compulsive eating and drinking, need for succorance, inhibited aggressive needs
- The oral aggression complex manifests itself in activities such as biting, love for eating bones, stuttering
- The oral rejection complex involves spitting out and disgust over oral activities and objects, low need for food, fear of oral infection or injury, need for seclusion and autonomy and dislike for nurturing objects
Summary
- Murray portrays personality as the hypothetical integrating agent within individuals that serves to organize and stabilizes their behaviour over time. In this scheme, all psychological events are functionally dependents upon under lying brain processess, without a brain there would be no personality.
- Murray's control theoretical concept need represent a force in the brain region which organizes psychological processes and behaviour. There are various means of classifying needs in Murray's theory such as niscrogenic and psychogenic, proactive-reactive, overt-covert, and effect-modal. Needs constantly interact with enviromental fares (press) to produce behaviour. Different need press combination that characterize a person's behaviour are called themas.
- One major application of the need theory is Thematic Appreciation test. The TAT is currently among the most widely used projection techniques in clinical diagnosis and motivational research.
