Introduction
Like a modern American Kant, Paul Meehl spent his entire professional life (excepting normal traveling activities of a contemporary scientist) in the city of his birth in 1920, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was precocious and extraordinarily intellectually acute, and his decision to become a psychologist crystallized early when, a year after his father’s suicide in 1931, he encountered Karl Menninger’s popular exposition of Freudian psychodynamics The Human Mind (Menninger 1930). He frequently referred to this event in his writings, and eventually he did become a psychoanalyst, a practicing licensed clinical psychologist, as well as a professor of psychology and psychiatry, of the philosophy of science, and of law (all at the University of Minnesota).
Early Career
Prior to entering the University of Minnesota as an undergraduate student, Meehl had already encountered and internalized, alongside of his voracious reading in psychology and psychoanalysis, the logic text of...
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Devonis, D. (2020). Meehl, Paul E.. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_2234
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