Chapter 5: Understanding A Personality As A Whole: Transcending the Anglo-American Methods Focus and Continental-European Holism Through a Look at Dynamic Emergence Processes

Psychology is an academic discipline that has two different interests. It inquires into both generality and diversity of the organism. Individual differences—both within the individual (over time) and between individuals (at the given moment)—become a problematic issue for science. Psychologists have no good reason for staying at narrow sensation-perception areas, because social change pushes them towards addressing practical issues. In such a situation, the data collecting system depending on the stimulus control procedure, we call it psychological experiment, doesn’t always work well. So another approach is highly needed. But still psychologists have been tied up to build a general picture that includes the diversity of particulars. The sub-discipline of intelligence and personality research in psychology is a battlefield of such troublesome work. If we focus on the general system of personality and intelligence, we can theorize the general sphere of them. However, individual lives are so specific and unique that we might see individual personality and intelligence ideographically. This is what nomothetic and idiographic debate says. Psychologists bravely fight and never withdraw from this battle. Demands for practical help from asylums, schools, and factories push psychologists to supply new techniques. Theories of personality and intelligence and practices of psychological testing are both new innovations from psychology to fit clinical demands. They have flourished and played a leading role in psychology using quantitative-oriented method for a century.