GORDON WILLARD ALLPORT

Gordon Willard Allport

Gordon Willard Allport

Gordon Allport was born in Montezuma, Indiana, in 1897, the youngest of four brothers. A shy and studious boy, he was teased quite a bit and lived a fairly isolated childhood. His father was a country doctor, which meant that Gordon grew up with his father's patients and nurses and all the paraphernalia of a miniature hospital. Everyone worked hard. His early life was otherwise fairly pleasant and uneventful.

After a little bit, Gordon could no longer stand the silence, and he blurted out an observation he had made on his way to meet Freud. He mentioned that he had seen a little boy on the bus who was very upset at having to sit where a dirty old man had sat previously (Pettigrew 1999). This experience made him realize that depth psychology sometimes digs too deeply, in the same way that he had earlier realized that behaviourism often doesn't dig deeply enough!

Theory

One thing that motivates human beings is the tendency to satisfy biological survival needs, which Allport referred to as opportunistic functioning. He noted that opportunistic functioning can be characterized as reactive, past-oriented, and, of course, biological.

But Allport felt that opportunistic functioning was relatively unimportant for understanding most of human behaviour. Most human behaviour, he believed, is motivated by something very different -- functioning in a manner expressive of the self -- which he called appropriate functioning (Allport 1937). For better or worse, the word proprium never caught on.

The Proprium

Putting so much emphasis on the self or proprium, Allport wanted to define it as carefully as possible. He came at that task from two directions, phenomenologically and functionally. First, phenomenologically, i.e. the self as experienced: He suggested that the self is composed of the aspects of your experiencing that you see as most essential (as opposed to incidental or accidental), warm (or “precious,” as opposed to emotionally cool), and central (as opposed to peripheral) (Nicholson 2003).

His functional definition became a developmental theory all by itself. The self has seven functions, which tend to arise at certain times of one's life:

Sense of body

Self-identity

Self-esteem

Self-extension

Self-image

Rational coping

Appropriate striving

Sense of body develops in the first two years of life. We have one; we feel its closeness, its warmth. It has boundaries that pain and injury, touch and movement, make us aware of. Self-identity also develops in the first two years. There comes a point were we recognize ourselves as continuing, as having a past, present, and future (Hevern 2003). We see ourselves as individual entities, separate and different from others. Of course -- we take that continuity for granted.

Self-extension develops between four and six. Certain things, people, and events around us also come to be thought of as central and warm, essential to my existence. “My” is very close to “me!” Some people define themselves in terms of their parents, spouse, or children, their clan, gang, community, college, or nation. Some find their identity in activities: I'm a psychologist, a student, a ...