Gordon Allport's Psychology And Characteristics Of Dynamic Psychology

Gordon Allport was born in Indiana in 1897. His father was a doctor and his mother was a teacher; Gordon was the youngest of four boys. When Allport was six, the family moved to Cleveland. Allport and his siblings were raised around the medical profession and sometimes filled in as medical assistants for their father. Allport’s mother wanted her children to know the value of work ethic and education. Allport graduated from high school where he was an editor of the school newspaper. He then went on to Harvard with a full ride scholarship, would first get bachelor’s degrees in economics and philosophy, then earn his PhD in psychology. After graduating, he traveled to Europe where he had meet Sigmund Freud. During his encounter with Freud, he

Why some people are caring verses why some people selfish. He was trying to find why people act in different manner in one setting, like school, then they do in another, like at home. He also wanted to know about people’s motives. He called any psychology that deals with motives is known as dynamic psychology. There are two types of dynamic psychology; the first is that people are only concerned with themselves only with mind-in-general. The second is that motives as infinitely varied and as self-sustaining (Allport, 1927; Allport

Being one of the first personality psychologist and navigating away from Freud’s theories was not easy to do. Allport knew that there was more to a person then just their unconscious thoughts and behaviors. He looking at the whole person in the present and how that shows their uniqueness or personality. I think that past events can definitely shape the kind of person that you are today but I do not think that your past is your complete being and what makes you different. Allport wanted to know what makes each person distinctive. That is why he found the 3,000 traits, he wanted to go into so much detail to understand every personality there is. He wanting to know the mind and being different from the Behaviorialist made me really think about people’s minds. It made me think about how people are not the way they are from just their past experiences but also the situations that they are put in on a daily basis. Which made me not want to be so judgmental of people just because they are not the friendliness or the most outgoing. Issues going on in the present could also make a person have a negative personality or a positive one. Getting to know someone, you need to take into account that they are influence by their past and present and be