Saul Rosenzweig's purview: from experimenter/experimentee complementarity to idiodynamics
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Published on: May 9, 2019
1srosenzw@artsci.wustl.edu
Abstract:
Following a brief personal biography, an exposition of Saul Rosenzweig's scientific contributions is presented. Starting in 1933 with experimenter/experimentee complementarity, this point of view was extended to implicit common factors in psychotherapy Rosenzweig (1936) then to the complementary pattern of the so-called schools of psychology Rosenzweig (1937). Similarly, converging approaches in personality theory emerged as another type of complementarity Rosenzweig (1944a). The three types of norms-nomothetic, demographic, and idiodynamic-within the range of dynamic human behavior were formulated and led to idiodynamics as a successor to personality theory. This formulation included the concept of the idioverse, defined as a self-creative and experiential population of events, which opened up a methodology (psychoarcheology) for reconstructing the creativity of outstanding scientific and artistic craftsmen like William James and Sigmund Freud, among psychologists, and Henry James, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne among writers of fiction.
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