Personality in Formation and Action
- Author:
William Healy, M.D. London.
Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1938. 8/6.
There is a quality about lectures in print that is not to be found in other kinds of writing. The audience seems to take a share in the building up of the argument, so that it becomes at once more vivid and more convincing. This quality is found in Dr. Healy’s book, which consists of a series of edited lectures given in memory of Dr. Salmon to the New York Academy of Medicine.
Although the lectures were presumably delivered to a medical audience, they are easy reading for the layman. Dr Healy was asked to render an account of what he had learned about personality in thirty years of clinical experience. He does this with clarity and proportion. It must indeed have been a difficult task to draw from his great storehouse of human lives those facts and inferences which had stood the test of time. There can be few authorities who are in a position to look back upon scientific studies of individuals made at the beginning of the century, and to ask themselves the question, ” Was I right or wrong? “
Dr Healy divides his subject into four main parts : The Materials of Personality Formation; The Developing and Emerging Personality; Personality in Widening Relationships, and Implications for the Future. In the first chapter he considers the meaning of ” self “, its basis in constitution and prenatal development, and the relationship between growth and experience. In the second he asks which elements in the structure of personality are fixed and unalterable, and which may prove to be modifiable. Dispatching the controversies over human instincts with the impatience of an empiricist, he considers with greater tolerance the subject of personality types, and of the innate determination of the strength of certain impulses and emotions. The part played by intelligence receives particularl}- careful consideration. Through all this chapter run the questions, ” What are the best ways of understanding a given personality? “, and ” How far can our understanding help in the development of desirable characteristics? “
The social aspects of personality growth are discussed in the third chapter. Here the psychiatrist leaves his clinic, and follows in the trail of the anthropologist, touching npon the relationship between personality and culture, between learning and the development of character, between individual incentives and social values. The final chapter on ” Implications for the Future”, turns mainly upon this last problem.
The book can only be appreciated as a whole, and is absorbing enough and not too long to be read at a sitting. Many profound problems of philosophy and social science are only suggested, and here it is Dr. Healy’s experience and wisdom rather than the thoroughness of his analysis which lends peculiar interest to his comments. He never commits the nnforgiveable sin of scientific complacency. Personality in all its infinite variations is still a subject for wonder. We have not begun, for instance, to understand its physical basis. We have hardly started to consider the development of personalities of social value, so absorbed have we been in explaining the motives of those who create social problems. We have been far too naive in our use of quantitative measurement. We know extremely little about an individual when we have estimated his intelligence. The life histories of delinquents show that high-grade defectives as a whole make just as good social adjustments as those of average intelligence.
Dr Healy concludes with some disparagement of achievements, but with hope for the future. Men and women of this generation have lost some of the moral virility of their forefathers. They will not regain it, as H. G. Wells has suggested, by a better knowledge of history, science or sociology, but only by a better understanding of what the author calls ” the momentous theme ” of personality.
Clement Brown.
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