He met Sigmund Freud once, and their interaction made Allport believe that psychoanalysis dug too deeply into a person’s past and psyche, whereas behaviorism—the dominant field in United States psychology at the time—didn’t go far enough. And this difference in opinion is most likely what allowed him to come up with concepts such as laughter being the best tool to battle tough times, which is ourquote of the day.
As Harvard University reported, the psychologist was one of their faculty members from 1930 to 1967, the year he died. Throughout his academic career, he conducted research on personality psychology and was likely the first person to teach a class on the topic in the United States, per VeryWellMind. He came up with a “highly influential three-tiered hierarchy of personality traits,” according to Harvard, which included cardinal, central and secondary traits. Through all of his work, he truly left quite a mark on modern psychology.
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Quote of the Day by Gordon Allport
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This quote is in Allport’s book, The Person in Psychology: Selected Essays. It appears in Part II, Chapter 7, “Mental Health: A Generic Attitude.”
The paragraph with this quote starts with Allport saying he believes that “the advancement of mental health involves a paradox: the tie that binds serious attitudinal orientation with humor.” Then we have our quote, with a little more context:
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Of course, he says that you have to then get serious and correct your behavior or face your issues head-on. But the initial good first step is laughter.
Sure, we can’t simply laugh through the pain a lot of the time. There are so many other factors or situations—such as mental disorders or illnesses that require medication or trauma that can’t just be ignored or joked away—that require more attention.
Just as he says after the quote, it’s important not to just look at the levity of a situation, but it’s also good to laugh at yourself. You don’t want to take yourself so seriously that you can’t recognize when you were wrong, too full of yourself or had too myopic a view on things.
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More Quotes from Gordon Allport
“Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.”“Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy.”“Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.”“People it seems, are busy leading their lives into the future, whereas psychology, for the most part, is busy tracing them into the past.”“To understand what a person is, it is necessary always to refer to what he may be in the future, for every state of the person is pointed in the direction of future possibilities.”“Much of our life is spent wishing others understood us better than they do.”Related: Quote of the Day: Ralph Waldo Emerson on Self-Reliance and Staying True to Yourself
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