Gordon Allport

Gordon Allport

History

• Born in Montezuma Indiana in 1897
• He is our first American born theorist
• He was the youngest of four brothers
• He was shy – teased often by his schoolmates
• He had an isolated childhood
• He was very studious and had a memory for words
• One peer once said he “swallowed a dictionary”
• His father was a humanitarian and a salesman who became a country doctor
• There was not enough money for a doctor's office
• So the Allport home became the hospital and the family was surrounded by nurses, patients and all the accoutrements of a small hospital.
• Everything was kept clean and sterile

History

• The family worked hard but it was a pleasant life
• The family was protestant and his mother was very religious and a former school teacher
• She emphasized finding the ultimate answers and wanted Gordon to become a missionary
• Gordon never embraced the missionary idea but enjoyed the intelligent questioning (debates) with his mother.
• His brother Floyd was a graduate student at Harvard in 1915 when Gordon started his B.S. at Harvard
• While at Harvard he was a subject in his brothers experiments in social psychology and he volunteered at the boys club the entire time he attended Harvard
• He got his B.S. in philosophy and economics
• He went to teach English and Economics in Istanbul Turkey at the age of 20 (would you go to a foreign country at the age of 20?)

History

• When he was 22 and on his way back to Harvard for his graduate schooling he traveled to Vienna to see one of his brothers working there and arranged a meeting with Sigmund Freud
• The meeting with Freud did not go well
• Freud thought he was there for a therapy session
• Gordon developed a dislike for psychoanalysis
• He felt that it went too deep and overlooked the surface explanation – sometimes a banana is just a banana