Social Change and Personality

Nevitt Sanford's career in psychology has spanned the years from the 1930's to the present. The canon of his works is vast--eight books and some 200 chapters, monographs, and articles. The contributions to this book, by students and colleagues, remind us of the great variety and significance of the concerns and interests he has addressed--development over the course of a human life, education (with emphasis upon higher education), personality theory, and political psychology (incorporating the concept of social action). Arriving upon the scene in psychology when he did, one of Nevitt Sanford's first publications, KhY~i~~~, K~~~~li!r, ~ ~~l~~~~iE (1943), reflected the interest of that time in biology and physiology (a concern of psychology which declined for some time thereafter, to be revived in the 1960's). It was also, however, the decade after psyc- analysis and Marxist ideology had made their dramatic entrance upon the stage of American intellectual life, and these two schools of thought, in many ways contradictory, have profoundly influenced him ever since. Nevitt has never lost his fascination with the power of infancy and childhood to affect development, and with the workings of the unconscious.