A Kind of Existentialism

Abstract

Some time ago I was asked by Don Bannister, who knew that I had begun to work on the sociology of knowledge in relation to personality theories, to write something on George Kelly for a wide- ranging symposium he intended to publish. At this time I had not studied Kelly very closely although I had looked at Rogers, Maslow and Allport, being greatly interested in their patterns of reaction to Freud, behaviourism and existentialism. In relation particularly to existentialism it seemed to me that just as the neo-Freudians had ‘socialised’ Freud so as to create a more bland, optimistic, acceptable and marketable kind of knowledge based on his work, so had the more individualist psychologists imported another great European source of knowledge—phenomenology and existentialism—but in such a selective way that much of its force and originality had been left somewhere in mid-Atlantic or in the customs posts for knowledge which surround societies, determining what can be let in and at what price to the importer.