MURRAY, HENRY ALEXANDER (b. - Gale

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Murray Murray One new technique developed at the Harvard Psychological Clinic was the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). The TAT is a series of ambiguous drawings, such as a boy looking at a violin on the table before him, or a man turning away from a woman lying on a bed. Subjects were asked to tell a story about the pictures, what is going on, what led up to the picture, and what may happen in the future. The objective was to draw out people’s fantasies, an important part of their unconscious life. Fantasies are important as they can be related to feelings and emotions, to formative experiences, to overt action, to neurotic symptoms, or to creative work. Morgan drew some of the TAT pictures, and she is listed as first author on the original paper (1935), perhaps to draw her more into the work of the Clinic. Murray was powerfully influenced by psychodynamic theory (Freud and Jung), and was affected by William James, the Gestaltists, Kurt Lewin, Clyde Kluckhohn, and others. He felt that Freudians emphasized sex and aggression, while Murray proposed a larger set of needs, including both viscerogenic or biological needs, such as needs for food, water, sex, and harm avoidance; and psychological needs, such as for acquisition, superiority, achievement, recognition, dominance, autonomy, affiliation, nurturance, play, and so on. Murray believed that psychodynamic psychologists were looking at some of the right questions, but with inadequate methods, whereas academic psychologists were sometimes more scientifically rigorous but investigating trivial problems. Explorations in Personality (1938) was an effort to integrate these two worlds, and to explore the uses of multiple scientific methods for “personology” or the study of lives, a kind of “experiential psychology.” His team of co-authors included many who went on to influential careers in psychology, including Robert White, Donald MacKinnon, Nevitt Sanford, Saul Rosenzweig, Jerome Frank, Erik Homburger (later Erikson) and others. In his autobiography, Murray said that in some quarters he was “thought of not as an author so much as an author of authors, a diversity of them, none bound to his ideas” (1981 [1967], p. 71). When Murray came up for tenure at Harvard in 1936, although the manuscript for Explorations in Personality was in draft, it had not yet been published. The meeting was held at the house of the Harvard President, James Bryant Conant. One of Murray’s supporters, Gordon Allport, argued that Murray was the intellectual descendant of William James and important in maintaining a humanistically oriented psychology at Harvard. Another committee member, neuropsychologist Karl Spencer Lashley, had recently been hired at Harvard; the chair of psychology, Edwin G. Boring, argued that Lashley was the best psychologist in the world. Lashley had a strong opposition to psychoanalysis, and strongly opposed the appointment. He said that James had done “more harm to psychology than any man that ever lived,” and threatened to resign if Murray was given tenure (Robinson, 1992, p. 225). Lashley saw this as a clash between “the older humanistic and philosophical psychology” (Murray) versus the new more exact and biological approach to psychology (Lashley). The tenure vote was split three to three. As a compromise, Murray was given two five-year non-tenured appointments. Murray, angered at this critical tenure review by men whose opinion he did not overly respect, went on leave from 1937 until the fall of 1941. After a year in Europe, he returned to the United States to work on his biography of Herman Melville, taking Melville through age thirtythree, when he finished Pierre. With the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the world changed, and Murray’s conception of himself and his work in the world also changed. Fighting against Nazism and winning World War II became of greatest immediate importance, while exploring the unconscious had a lower priority. In response to a request from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, Murray finished by October 1943 a 227-page psychological study of Adolf Hitler, “Analysis of the Personality of Adolph [sic] Hitler, with Predictions of His Future Behavior and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and After Germany’s Surrender.” Much of this was later published, without adequate acknowledgement of Murray’s role, by Walter C. Langer as The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report (1972). Once the Hitler study was completed, Murray went to Washington, DC, to eventually lead a program selecting recruits for the OSS intelligence service. This multiform assessment drew on procedures from the Harvard Psychological Clinic and used a variety of tests of intelligence, mechanical ability, group problem solving, debating ability, and physical strength. The candidates were rated on eleven different variables, discussed in a diagnostic council, and sketched in a biographical profile, as reported in The Assessment of Men (Murray, et al, 1948). Personality in Society and Culture. Murray was changed by World War II. The “deep-diving” exploration of the unconscious with Morgan, trying to go beyond upperclass conventions, was no longer as central in his life as it had been, and he turned more to the ways in which personality is interwoven with society and culture. How could another world war be prevented? His thoughts turned to world government, and the need perhaps for a “new mythology” or a new cultural framework to integrate opposing cultural systems and reduce the likelihood of future international conflicts. NEW DICTIONARY OF SCIENTIFIC BIOGRAPHY 217
Murray Murray Murray’s two five-year appointments would have ended in 1947, but Murray resigned from Harvard in June 1945. Behind the scenes, even though not formally on the faculty, he was involved in the formation of Harvard’s new interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations, founded in January 1946. He completed the manuscript for Assessment of Men (1948) on the U.S. Office of Strategic Services study he had headed, and he co-edited Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture (Kluckhohn and Murray, 1948, revised 1953), which became an important collection of readings in the new Social Relations department. This included the famous line, “Every man is in certain respects (a.) like all other men, (b.) like some other men, (c.) like no other man.” (In later statements, this was rephrased in terms of “persons.”) Individuals are like “all other persons” due to similar features in the biological endowments of all humans, in their physical environments, and in their social and cultural worlds. Being like “some other persons” can be affected by membership in different nations, tribes, and social classes. Similarities can also be shaped by having different types of psychopathology, or between the wealthy and the poor in different societies. Finally, there are the ways in which a person is like no other person. An individual’s ways of perceiving, feeling, needing, thinking, and behaving are not exactly duplicated by others. This singularity is produced by unique biological endowments interacting with particular environments, and unique sequences of interaction between developing persons and their environments. Analysis of these similarities and differences and their causes could engage social and clinical psychologists, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists in interdisciplinary inquiry for years to come. Morgan did not want Murray to return to Harvard after World War II, but to devote more time to finishing an account of their relationship, which they had both been working on. She wrote that his work on Melville could be a preparation for writing about their relationship. He never published a book-length biography of Melville, but did write a 90-page introduction plus notes to Melville’s Pierre (1949), a novel that Morgan and Murray felt uncannily reflected their experience. Murray did return to Harvard in 1948, as a lecturer with tenure in Social Relations; he was promoted to full professor in 1950, and remained there until his retirement in 1962. His conceptual work often refers obliquely to the power of “creative dyads,” but it was not clear what he was referring to, until he told this part of his story to Forrest Robinson, as related in Love’s Story Told: A Life of Henry A. Murray (1992). Murray’s wife, Josephine, died in 1962, and Morgan drowned near a beach where they were vacationing in the Caribbean in 1967, perhaps from medical problems, alcohol, or suicide. Murray was not able to openly tell their story during his lifetime, and it may have cost them dearly. Murray entered a second marriage, which gave him a new life, with psychologist Nina Chandler Fish in 1969. She was familiar enough with the dyad to avoid that pattern and seek another way of life together. A number of scholars tried to help Murray with his unfinished publications, including Eugene Taylor, and several “Morsels” on Melville were published in the 1980s. In 1970, when approached by prospective biographer Robinson, Murray provided nearly one hundred interviews, with the agreement that the book would be published posthumously. Murray died in 1988, and his biography was published in 1992. The biography proved immensely controversial. It illuminated much about Murray’s relationship with Morgan, and his connections to Jung and Melville. This is a complex story, sometimes tragic, and much remains to be understood about how Murray’s life is related to his work in personality theory, personality assessment, and the history of psychology and social relations at Harvard (Runyan, 1994, 2006). Murray’s Legacy. Murray made major contributions as a founder of personality psychology, a leader in personality assessment, director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and a scholar of Herman Melville. With his background of an MD and a PhD in biochemistry, he sought to expand the bounds of scientific psychology so that it could include the study of persons and lives. Many were influenced by Murray, either personally or by his work. Michigan State University started a series of Henry A. Murray lectures beginning in 1978, and that same year, the annual Henry A. Murray award for contributions to personality psychology and the study of lives was established and given through the Society of Personality and Social Psychology of the American Psychological Association. Murray was inspired by James, as well as by Jung, Freud, Melville, and others. In turn, Murray’s vision inspired many who went on to develop personality psychology. The first generation includes Robert White, who wrote The Abnormal Personality (1948) and Lives in Progress (1952) and followed Murray as director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic; Donald MacKinnon, who became the founding director of the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research at the University of California, Berkeley in 1949; Nevitt Sanford, who co-authored The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and founded the Wright Institute; Gardner Lindzey, who edited the Handbook of Social Psychology (1954) and co-authored Theories of Personality (1957); and Erik Erikson, author of Child- 218 NEW DICTIONARY OF SCIENTIFIC BIOGRAPHY
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MURRAY, HENRY ALEXANDER (b. - Gale

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