A Dialectical Psychology: Implications for Research and Practice

During a 1919 meeting between Gordon Allport and Sigmund Freud (Allport, 1967), Allport broke a silence by telling a story of a phobic boy with an anal mother whom Allport had observed on the train he had taken to meet Freud. Freud is said to have interpreted Allport's story of the boy along the lines of the joke whose thesis is that when one begins a story about a hypothetical friend that the speaker has dissembled and is in fact referring to his or her own self. Freud's query regarding Allport's identification with the child, and Allport's subsequent rejection of Freud's hypothesis, led Allport (1967) to dismiss psychoanalytic theory in favor of the empiricism that characterized his adjective checklist that became the model for trait psychology. More recently, the apparent gap between the trait psychology model and the psychoanalytic model has been described as being a case of the former privileging the external while the later also accounts for internal states (Westen, 2006).