A method for the analysis of personal data is described Although primarily directed toward extracting recurring dynamic sequences, "scnpts," "themas," "guiding messages," the method can be utilized to assess a host of personality vanables TWo major strategies are employed (a) letting the data set reveal itself, and (,b) asking the data a question Rules for data extraction and data transformation are discussed Application of the method to work m psychobiography is indicated by exampleIn this article I wish to focus on how we as personologists can know or understand the uniqueness of a single personality in much the same way that we can recognize the particulanty of a human face Although I am certain that when I look at a face I could judge whether there are unusual features that would easily identify it and these judgments depend somewhat on normative factors, there is a unity about a face which makes it that person's own, that person's umqueness In fact we are so clearly aware of this expectation of smgulanty that we are markedly concerned with lodc-alikes, twins and others, and rather strongly affected by the possibility of seeing oneself m a stranger, the fascination of the doppelganger In a similar vein, we may include the idea that although all faces have essentially the same constitutive elements which are geared to performing the same functions in humans, they are all quite different and each face is identifiable in its own nght
Tomkins's "script theory" was employed for personological inquiry into the ways that individuals organize their experience. This theory posits that individuals' experiences are organized by ideo-affective construals or "scripts." This thesis was examined by first extracting emotional incidents or "scenes" from the autobiographical reports of 10 individuals, and then deriving from these scenes the abstract sequential rules or "scripts" for handling scenes. One month following this assessment, the individuals were asked to create stories to aifective stimuli in order to assess whether the scripts derived from this source would be parallel to those generated in the autobiographical memories. A matching task determined that the individuals' ways of interpreting the affective stimuli indeed reflected the same scripts as those which appeared in their autobiographical memories. While particular script elements appeared to be person-specific, the general parameters of scripts were sometimes shared by various individuals. Avenues for future methodological developments and theoretical inquiries are discussed.The study of personality has suffered two forms of attack in the past 20 years. The first attack resulted from an empirical analysis, the second from a theoretical analysis. The research-based critique is best identified in Mischel's 1968 book on personality. In this work, Mischel argued that a survey of the empirical research on personality reveals that
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