Development of the Self as Subject

Abstract

At the University of Minnesota in the late 1930s, graduate students would have been scornful of anyone calling herself a psychologist who studied the self or ego or character. Most of the best students (who later became clinicians or social psychologists) were experimenting with rats; a few were looking admiringly to Chicago, where Thurstone was developing mathematical and statistical methods of analysis. One of us would like to confront her 20-year-old self with the knowledge that she would spend several decades studying ego development, which includes, or is a major aspect of, the development of character. Although her original interest in psychology was methodological, the data of personality assessment themselves have directed the work to this path. But that is another story (Loevinger, 1979, 1987).