Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality

Allport's central claim is that personality is fundamentally a process of becoming—an ongoing growth and development that can best be discovered by looking within ourselves—rather than a fixed structure to be measured from outside . He rejects the dominant mid-century tendencies that reduced the image of man as a free, democratic being, whether through behaviorist reduction to stimulus-response mechanisms or through drive-reduction models that explained adult motivation entirely by infantile origins . The book argues for a psychology adequate to human freedom and individuality, one that takes the self (the proprium) seriously as an organizing, future-oriented system. As one reviewer put it, the book's merit is that it makes its philosophical biases explicit, stating heartfelt opposition to most tendencies of current psychology .

The proprium is Allport's term for the self considered as a growing, organizing system—not a static entity but a developmental achievement that accounts for the unity of personality, higher motives, and continuity of personal memory . In Becoming, Allport devotes chapters to "Is the Concept of Self Necessary?" and "The Proprium," arguing that psychology cannot do without a concept of self if it is to explain how a person's diverse experiences and actions cohere . The proprium is what makes personality a pattern rather than a collection of disconnected habits. Its centrality reflects Allport's conviction that any adequate personality theory must account for the person's own self-interpretation and striving, not merely for externally observable traits or behaviors.

Becoming occupies a pivotal position between Allport's 1937 textbook Personality: A Psychological Interpretation and his 1961 synthesis Pattern and Growth in Personality. In the 1955 lectures, he distills themes that had been developing for nearly two decades—the uniqueness of the individual, the inadequacy of trait atomism, and the need for an idiographic science—into a compact public statement. Britannica notes that in Becoming he stressed the importance of self and the uniqueness of adult personality, with the self as an identifiable organization accounting for unity and continuity . The 1961 Pattern and Growth then expands these arguments into a full systematic treatment, making Becoming a useful précis of Allport's mature position.

Reception was respectful but not uncritical. Contemporary Psychology's review, reprinted as "On Man's Goodness," called the book "provocative, penetrating, altogether worth reading" while observing that it is "curiously resistant to a critical examination" because of its brevity, general audience, and frankly homiletic intention—swinging between exposition and exhortation . The reviewer acknowledged the book's value in making Allport's philosophical commitments explicit but implied that its persuasive force rested more on eloquence than on argumentative rigor. The New Republic called it "a splendid statement of the historical development of psychology," and Rollo May praised Allport for sharing with William James and John Dewey the capacity to see man as human regardless of scientific trends .

Allport uses these philosophical traditions as contrasting models for psychology. The Lockean tradition treats the mind as passive, receiving impressions from outside and building complex ideas from simple sensory elements—a model that, in Allport's view, underwrites associationist and behaviorist psychologies that reduce personality to environmental inputs. The Leibnitzian tradition treats the mind as active, self-organizing, and purposive, developing from within according to its own inherent principles. Allport's sympathies are clearly with the latter, and Becoming's table of contents places these traditions early, framing the book's argument that a psychology of personality must adopt an active, growth-oriented model . The distinction serves his broader case for a psychology of becoming against a psychology of mere reaction.

It is one of the most accessible entry points to Allport's thought. At just over one hundred pages and written for the Terry Lectures' general audience, it avoids the technical apparatus of his textbooks . The prose is urbane and eloquent, as reviewers consistently noted, and the argument is presented with rhetorical force rather than through dense citation. However, its brevity means that key concepts—functional autonomy, the proprium, the idiographic-nomothetic distinction—are sketched rather than fully developed. Readers seeking systematic exposition should turn to Pattern and Growth in Personality; readers seeking a compelling short statement of Allport's humanistic commitments will find Becoming an ideal introduction.