The European Origins of “Personality Psychology”
Abstract
The year 1937 is remembered by historians of psychology as the year of the birth of personality psychology. This discipline emerged in the United States thanks to the work of several psychologists who came to organize its methodology and fundamental notions. Gordon Allport is the most important representative of this change within scientific psychology. This paper analyzes the continuity between “before” and “after” the foundation of the discipline and locates several important points of reference for the initial scientific research on personality. The aim of this essay is to reconstruct historically the contribution of some important lines of “European” psychological research that have had a remarkable influence both from the theoretical and methodological points of view on the scientific foundation of personality psychology studies in its modern developments.
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