STERN, LOUIS WILLIAM

(b. Berlin, Germany, 29 April 1871; d. Durham, North Carolina, 27 March 1938),

philosophy, psychology.

Stern is known primarily as the inventor of the intelligence quotient (IQ), since it was he who originally suggested that a child’s level of intellectual functioning be indexed not as the difference between mental age (MA) and chronological age (CA), that is, as [MA – CA], but instead as the ratio of the former to the latter, that is, as [MA/CA]. However, Stern made notable contributions to many other areas of psychology, including child psychology and differential psychology, and from his own perspective his most important contribution was a comprehensive system of thought he called critical personalism. The conceptual foundation of that system is the irreducible distinction between persons and things, and it was this distinction that guided virtually all of Stern’s many contributions to psychology over the course of his illustrious and highly productive career.

Youth and Student Years Stern was the only child of Sigismund Stern and his wife Rosa Stern (whose maiden name was also Stern; indeed she and Sigismund Stern were cousins). Throughout his life, Stern preferred the name William to his given first name, Louis. In some of his early publications, authorship was attributed to L. William Stern, but from 1906 on he identified himself simply as William Stern.

Sigismund Stern operated a small studio specializing in wallpaper sketches, and though the income from this business usually sufficed, the family’s financial resources were nevertheless often quite limited. As a schoolboy young William had to earn spending money by tutoring other pupils, and at times he also had to make do with secondhand books.

We learn something about Stern as an adolescent from Anfänge der Reifezeit: Ein Knabentagebuch in psychologischer Bearbeitung (1925; Coming of age: A psychological analysis of a boy’s diary). Written when Stern was fifty-four, the book did not reveal that the author and the subject were one and the same. Especially salient in Anfänge der Reifezeit are Stern’s revelations about his struggles with arrogance—his own as well as that of others. For example, following several previous diary entries in 1885 in which Stern had mentioned his concerns in this regard, he wrote the following on 15 May 1886:

Nothing was settled today except that the leaders of the club would be elected, and that there would be three. S., R., and F. were elected. I voted for the first two and for K. I got only one vote, … because, I must admit, I behaved rather badly as a result of my damned arrogance. If only I could overcome that! (p. 73)

Many years later, Stern’s daughter, Eva Michaelis-Stern, wrote in “Erinnerung an meine Eltern” (1991; Recollections of my parents) that her father was “completely free of vanity” (p. 136). If this was true of Stern as an adult, that was only because, years earlier, he had prevailed in his youthful struggle against his own inclinations toward arrogance.

In schoolwork, Stern’s talents were manifest early on, and these are the gifts he quite deliberately cultivated as he matured. His model here was not his father but his maternal grandfather, also named Sigismund Stern. The scion of a cultured Jewish family, grandfather Sigismund studied philology and philosophy at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin (today the Humboldt University), and concluded his doctoral studies in 1834 with a dissertation titled “Grundlegung zur Sprachphilosophie” (Foundations of a philosophy of language) (Bühring, 1996b). At the tender age of fourteen, William Stern wrote admiringly in his diary about his grandfather, and resolved to follow in his footsteps.

In 1888 Stern began his studies at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin. He soon lost interest in philology, however, and shifted his attention to philosophy and its new subspecialty, psychology. In this latter connection, Stern was especially intrigued by the work of the young experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbing-haus, who was teaching and conducting research at the University of Berlin at just the time that Stern was pursuing his studies there. What most captured Stern’s imagination as a student was the possibility of combining his philosophical interests with concrete, empirical work of the sort being carried out by Ebbinghaus and other prominent practitioners of the so-called New Science. So, sometime during the third or fourth semester of his university studies, Stern wrote (rather melodramatically) in his personal diary: “Now it is done. All the bridges are burned, and there is no turning back. I will find my way in philosophy or not at all. It is a consolation that a scientific subspecialty of philosophy, psychology, is open to me” (Selbstdarstellung 1927, p. 134).

The Breslau Years After completing his doctoral dissertation, “Die Analogie im volkstümlichen Denken” (Analogy in popular thought), in 1893 under the direction of Moritz Lazarus, Stern remained in Berlin, conducting independent experimental research at the university and hoping eventually to secure a faculty position there. The prospects for this were not good, however, and in 1897 he accepted the offer of a position as Privatdozent in the Institute of Philosophy, with a specialization in psychology, at the University of Breslau (present-day Wroc aw, Poland). This offer was arranged by Ebbinghaus, who had moved from Berlin to Breslau a few years earlier.

On 7 April 1900, Stern and his new wife Clara welcomed their first child, daughter Hilde, into the world, and immediately started keeping a diary on the child’s development. The diary project continued through the births of two other children, Günther (1902), and Eva (1904), for a total of eighteen years. In the more than five thousand handwritten pages that eventually accumulated, the Sterns recorded observations on virtually all aspects of the psychological development of their children.

In 1907 Clara and William Stern published the first of six planned monographs based on the diaries, Die Kindersprache (1907; Children’s speech). Two years later, the couple published Erinnerung, Aussage und Lüge in der ersten Kindheit (1909; Recollection, testimony, and lying in early childhood). The other four planned monographs never materialized. In 1914, however, William Stern published, as sole author, Psychologie der frühen Kindheit, bis zum sechsten Lebensjahr (The psychology of early childhood up to the sixth year of life), and in this project he drew extensively on the diary material. Georg Eckardt (1989) referred to Psychologie der frühen Kindheit as “the unchallenged standard work in scientific child psychology in the German-speaking world” (p. 11) and indeed seven editions of the work eventually appeared.

In his 1927 intellectual autobiography (Selbstdarstel-lung), Stern made explicit his sense of the significance of the diary work for the larger undertaking that centered his entire scholarly life. In particular he explained how the material accumulated in the diaries provided him with “a perspectival foundation for the philosophical theory I was gradually developing” (1927, p. 145). The philosophical theory to which Stern was referring is that comprehensive system of thought that he called critical personalism, a comprehensive worldview (Weltanschauung) predicated on the incontrovertible distinction between persons and things.

“Ich werte, also bin ich … Wert” (I evaluate, therefore I am … valu[able]), Stern wrote in the Wertphilosophie (Philosophy of value; p. 34), and though that work was not published until 1924, Stern had embraced its essential principles many years earlier. To e-valuate is to project value outward onto some entity or state of affairs. Persons do this; things do not. Things can be evaluated, passively, but cannot themselves actively evaluate. Moreover, since persons can and do e-valuate, it follows that value must somehow inhere within them, for an entity cannot project outward something that is not in some sense “within” to begin with. Persons are thus inherently valuable, whereas things are not.

Stern’s thinking in this regard took shape against the background of an experimental psychology that, already by 1900, was embracing what he took to be a far too mechanistic view of human mental life and behavior. The ascendant view, embodied for Stern most vividly though by no means exclusively in the works of his own one-time mentor and senior colleague Ebbinghaus, was an essentially Newtonian one according to which persons, like any other objects of scientific investigation, could properly be regarded as units of matter in motion. This view effaces the distinction between persons and things, and this, Stern steadfastly maintained, was both scientifically unwarranted and morally problematic. In this light, Stern’s efforts to secure a place for critical personalism within psychology can be seen as part of a larger effort within German intellectual circles during the first three decades of the twentieth century to “reenchant” (Harrington, 1996) the scientific worldview through an appreciation for organismic wholeness, meaningfulness, and genuine purposefulness of human thought and action, both individual and collective. In all of this, Stern’s views were much closer to those of such scholars as Wilhelm Dilthey and Wilhelm Windelband than to those of prominent experimental psychologists of the era, such as Ebbinghaus, Edward Lee Thorndike, and Hugo Münsterberg. Already in 1900, Stern wrote to his philosopher friend and colleague at the University of Freiburg:

What we need above all is a comprehensive worldview, one that relates the psychological and the physical, that is antimechanistic, that is vitalistic-teleological; one in which modern natural science dogma is reduced to its true—that is, relatively inferior—value. This is a huge task, but I will work on it as I can. (Stern letter to Jonas Cohn, 31 July 1900; 1994, p. 33)

A particularly noteworthy feature of Stern’s oeuvre is the fact that even as he sustained his efforts on the theoretical and philosophical aspects of this “huge task” over the entirety of his scholarly life, he was also a leading figure in the establishment and proliferation of psychology as an empirical—and applied—science. In collaboration with Otto Lipmann, Stern founded the Institute for Applied Psychology in 1906 and, two years later, the Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie(Journal of applied psychology). Until 1930, when financial pressures forced the cessation of publication, this journal served as a primary outlet for articles in the areas of differential psychology, forensic psychology, social and anthropological psychology, and experimental pedagogy.

By Stern’s own account, his ultimate scholarly objective was to achieve a philosophically sound and scientifically defensible conception of human individuality (1927, p. 142). Indeed, in the first sentence of the foreword to his 1900 book Über Psychologie der individuellen Differenzen(On the psychology of individual differences), a work that effectively founded the subdiscipline of differential psychology, Stern identified the problem of understanding individuality as the single greatest challenge to twentieth-century scientific psychology. He followed this preliminary work followed a decade later with the much more extensive and thoroughly developed Die Differentielle Psychologie in ihren methodischen Grundlagen (1911; Methodological foundations of differential psychology).

Consistent with his vision of this latter work as, essentially, a methods handbook, Stern explicitly relegated his theoretical ideas to a secondary role. On the other hand, reflecting his convictions regarding the indispensability of theoretical and philosophical considerations to a viable psychology, he urged readers of the 1911 book to consult his “philosophical book,” referring to the first volume of Person und Sache (1906). It was in that work, Stern noted, where he had developed his “conception of the structure of the human individual”—that is, the person— and in the process elaborated a set of “philosophical assumptions which on many points deviate in non-trivial ways from the currently prevailing opinions” (1911, p. v).

As it happened, the other “prevailing opinions” to which Stern alluded in this passage were the ones to win widest favor among his contemporaries. Highly influential in this regard was a perspective on the scientific study of individuality set forth by Thorndike. In a monograph titled Individuality and published in 1911 (coincidentally, the same year in which Stern’s Die Differentielle Psychologie in ihren methodischen Grundlagen appeared), Thorndike argued that any given individual’s personality could be represented quantitatively in terms of his or her standing, measured relative to others, on each of some presumably small number of basic dimensions applicable to all individuals. The essential task of a scientific psychology of personality would thus consist of (1) establishing the basic dimensions empirically (relying largely on a statistical analysis technique known as factor analysis), and then (2) determining through further empirical investigation the statistical relationships between measures of individual differences along those dimensions and measures of individual differences in whatever domains of human behavior might be deemed worthy of investigation.

In Thorndike’s approach to scientific personality studies, persons are properly regarded simply as instances of measurement categories, in principle substitutable for all other persons identified as instances of the same measurement categories. In effect, this approach to one of the two major knowledge objectives of psychology, which Stern called Menschenkenntnis or the understanding of human persons, entails the reduction of those persons to things, in diametric opposition to the fundamental tenet of critical personalism. Further complicating matters were the initiatives of Stern’s colleague and countryman Münsterberg in the applied domain of Menschenbehandlung, or the treatment of human persons. In his Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913), Münsterberg explicitly advocated the systematic assessment and study of individual differences in talents, preferences, and personality characteristics as a basis for deploying workers in ways maximally beneficial, in the long run, to employers. In effect, this entailed regarding certain individuals simply in terms of their usefulness to others. This commitment ran counter to the Kantian moral imperative, which Stern embraced within critical personalism, to always regard persons as ends in and of themselves, and never simply as a means for achieving others’ ends.

It is for just these reasons that, as the ideas of Thorndike and Münsterberg won favor among Stern’s contemporaries, the founder of differential psychology became increasingly critical of the discipline as a framework for advancing the scientific understanding of persons.

The Hamburg Years In 1916, in the midst of World War I, Stern accepted an offer to succeed Ernst Meumann (1862–1915) as director of the research laboratory for educational psychology in Hamburg, a vibrant and cosmopolitan port city in northern Germany. There was no university in Hamburg at that time, but the efforts of Stern and a number of other academics and influential civic figures soon changed that. In 1919 the University of Hamburg formally opened its doors, with Stern as director of the Philosophical Seminar and the Psychological Laboratory. In this capacity, Stern also continued as editor of the Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Psychologie und experimentelle Pädagogik(Journal of pedagogical psychology and experimental pedagogy), a job he had inherited from Meumann.

If Stern’s time in Breslau can properly be characterized as “foundational years,” then his time in Hamburg was certainly a time of fruition. Stern carried out dozens of empirical investigations in the Psychological Laboratory either by himself or in collaboration with others under his direction. He also continued to write significant philosophical and theoretical works, including Die Psychologie und der Personalismus (1917; Psychology and personalism), Grundgedanken der personalistischen Philosophie (1918; Foundations of personalistic philosophy), volumes two and three of Person und Sache, Die menschliche Persönlichkeit(1918; The human personality) and Wertphilosophie(1924; Philosophy of value). Still another programmatic work, Studien zur Personwissenschaft (Studies in personal-istic science) appeared in 1930.

These works give clear evidence of Stern’s enduring convictions about the necessity of maintaining close intellectual ties between the disciplines of philosophy and psychology, which already by then were becoming estranged from one another. It was, moreover, largely in consideration of his philosophical commitment to the irreducible distinction between persons and things that, as noted earlier, Stern became critical of developments within the mainstream of differential psychology. During his Hamburg years Stern authored several works sharply critical of the exclusive commitment of many investigators to quantitative measurement procedures and statistical analysis techniques at the expense of sustained and penetrating—but nonstandardized—probing of individual cases. To cite just one example, in a lecture delivered at the Fourth International Congress for Psychotechnics in Paris in 1927, Stern criticized the increasingly widespread practice of trying to represent persons strictly in terms of multiattribute personality “profiles” based on standardized assessment instruments. He argued, “the person is a unified whole, and has depth.… A human being is not a mosaic, and therefore cannot be described as a mosaic. All attempts to represent a person simply in terms of a sequence of test scores are fundamentally false” (1929, pp. 63–64). Later in the same lecture, Stern directed his remarks at psychotechnicians engaged primarily in applied work in industrial and organizational settings: “Psychotechnicians using their test results for various selection purposes must remember that they are not dealing with machines or materials, whose quality and economic significance for the company is in fact expressible through test scores, but rather with human beings, whose occupation is a part—and indeed a very essential part—of their entire personal life” (p. 72).

Influence during and after His Lifetime In his 1927 Selbstdarstellung Stern could write with evident satisfaction that although the worldview that had grounded all of his other scholarly contributions had at first not commanded much attention, he could speak of seeing “many signs that in my personalistic convictions I was no longer so alone … as I have been two for the past two decades”(p. 152). Indeed, by the late 1920s his works were earning wide and overwhelmingly favorable commentary not only in German-speaking countries but also with substantial frequency in France and the United States. Without doubt, Stern had become one of the most well known and highly regarded scientific psychologists of his time, a development confirmed by his election in 1931 as president of the German Psychological Society.

Two years later, Stern’s star was still rising. In Die Hauptrichtungen der gegenwärtigen Psychologie (1933; Major trends in contemporary psychology), the prominent philosopher Richard Müller-Freienfels (1882–1949) devoted substantial space to a discussion of Stern’s work. To be sure, Müller-Freienfels expressed concern that Stern viewed both the world and the psychological lives of the persons living in that world as “less in conflict than in reality they are.” In the main, however, Müller-Freienfels expressed not only high admiration for Stern’s extraordinarily multifaceted contributions to psychology but also great optimism about the future of his personalistic world-view. After mentioning Stern’s pioneering work in differential psychology, Müller-Freienfels continued:

One cannot do justice to the wealth of Stern’s contributions without taking into consideration the valuable results of his investigations in child psychology, the psychology of testimony, and countless other areas of psychological research. In any case, Stern’s personalistics offers an impressive program in which the decisive directions of contemporary research are formulated with great clarity. Admittedly, this clarity overly simplifies certain complexities that will have to be accommodated by future research within the system. Yet even here, especially in his [1930 publication], “Studies in Personalistic Science,” Stern himself has pointed us in the right direction. (p. 93)

The Final Years Alas, even as the ink was drying on this positive appraisal of Stern’s work, the scientific edifice that he had so painstakingly constructed over his scholarly lifetime was beginning to collapse around him. On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler ascended to power in Germany. Less than three months later Stern, as a Jew, was barred from all academic and administrative activities at the University of Hamburg, and his scholarly life was thus effectively ended. Two of his closest associates, Lipmann and Martha Muchow, committed suicide within a month of each other in the fall of that same year. Finally persuaded by his daughter Eva in 1935 that he needed to flee Germany, he lived briefly in the Netherlands, where he managed to complete Allgemeine Psychologie auf personalistischer Grundlage (1935; General psychology from the personalistic standpoint), his last major work. Together with Clara, he then emigrated to the United States, where he served on the faculty at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, until his death due to heart failure on 27 March 1938.

Of course, no appreciation of Stern appeared in Nazi Germany. However, the American psychologist Gordon Allport (1897–1967), who was a personal friend as well as professional associate of Stern's, honored his departed colleague in words reminiscent of those of Müller-Freienfels cited above:

William Stern was both a pioneer and a systematizer in psychology.… He will be remembered … for his sure-footed explorations in differential psychology, forensic psychology, psychotechnics, child psychology, and intelligence testing. But he will be remembered likewise and, I think, with increasing renown for his theoretical system of personalistic psychology.… It troubled him relatively little that his formulations ran counter to the trend of the times, particularly in American thought.… [H]e believed so intensely in the liberating powers of personalistic thought that he had faith in its ultimate acceptability to others. Thinking [personalistically], Stern became a monumental defender of an unpopular cause. [But] the personalistic way of thought will yet have its day, and its day will be long and bright. (1938, pp. 770, 773)

To date, developments within the mainstream of scientific psychology cannot be said to have repaid either Stern’s unwavering personalistic convictions or Allport’s confident prognostication. On the contrary, throughout the twentieth century mainstream thinking about what Stern called the “problem of individuality” has been thoroughly dominated by concepts and—above all—statistical research methods conforming closely to those ideas first explicitly set forth by Thorndike and roundly criticized by Stern. At a more general, perspectival level, critical personalism long ago vanished from a landscape defined primarily by the literature of a highly positivistic-empiricistic psychology, and to this day critical personalism remains all but completely unknown among contemporary scholars. Whether the twenty-first century will host any consequential revival of Stern’s estimable contributions to psychology remains to be seen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY STERN

Über Psychologie der individuellen Differenzen (Ideen zu einer “Differentiellen Psychologie”). Leipzig, Germany: Barth, 1900. With this book, Stern effectively founded the discipline of differential psychology.

Person und Sache: System der philosophischen Weltanschauung von William Stern. Vol. 1, Ableitung und Grundlehre (des kritischen personalismus). Leipzig, Germany: Barth, 1906. The first of the three volumes comprising Person and Thing, this work lays out the philosophical foundations of critical personalism.

With Clara Stern. Die Kindersprache. Leipzig, Germany: Barth, 1907.

With Clara Stern. Erinnerung, Aussage und Lüge in der ersten Kindheit. Leipzig, Germany: Barth, 1909. Translated by James T. Lamiell as Recollection, Testimony, and Lying in Early Childhood (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1999).

Die Differentielle Psychologie in ihren methodischen Grundlagen. Leipzig, Germany: Barth, 1911. By Stern’s own account, this book was written “in place” of a second edition of the 1900 book, and solidified differential psychology’s place as a major subdiscipline within scientific psychology.

Psychologie der frühen Kindheit, bis zum sechsten Lebensjahr. Leipzig, Germany: Quelle and Meyer, 1914. The first of what would eventually be seven editions of a child psychology textbook. Translated from the 1923 edition by Anna Barwell as The Psychology of Early Childhood up to the Sixth Year of Age (London: Allen and Unwin, 1924).

Vorgedanken zur Weltanschauung (niedergeschrieben im Jahre 1901). Leipzig, Germany: Barth, 1915. This text was actually written in 1901, and clearly establishes that, already by that early date, Stern was formulating the foundational ideas of critical personalism.

Die Psychologie und der Personalismus. Leipzig, Germany: Barth, 1917. A highly condensed presentation of the central ideas of critical personalism.

Grundgedanken der personalistischen Philosophie. Philosophische Vorträge 20. Berlin: Reuther and Reichard, 1918. This work is similar in its content to the 1917 work Die Psychologie und der Personalismus, but was written for a readership constituted primarily of philosophers rather than of psychologists.

Person und Sache: System der philosophischen Weltanschauung. Vol. 2, Die menschliche Persönlichkeit. Leipzig, Germany: Barth, 1918.

“Richtlinien für die Methodik der psychologischen Praxis.” Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie 29 (1921): 1–16.

“Selbstdarstellung.” In Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, edited by Raymond Schmidt, vol. 6, 128–184. Leipzig, Germany: Meiner, 1922–1929. This is an intellectual autobiography. Translated by Susanne Langer as “William Stern” in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 1, edited by Carl Murchison, pp. 335–388 (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1930).

Person und Sache: System der philosophischen weltanschuung von William Stern. Vol. 3, Wertphilosophie. Leipzig, Germany: Barth, 1924.

Anfänge der Reifezeit: Ein Knabentagebuch in psychologischer Bearbeitung. Leipzig, Germany: Quelle and Meyer, 1925.

“Aus dreijähriger Arbeit des Hamburger Psychologischen Laboratoriums.” Zeitschrift für pädagogische Psychologie 26 (1925): 289–307.

“Persönlichkeitsforschung und Testmethode.” Jahrbuch der Charakterologie 6 (1929): 63–72. One of several articles published between 1920 and 1933 in which Stern is sharply critical of the increasingly exclusive reliance of differential psychologists on standardized tests and statistical analysis procedures.

Studien zur Personwissenschaft: Personalistik als Wissenschaft. Leipzig, Germany: Barth, 1930.

“Der personale Faktor in Psychotechnik und praktischer Psychologie.” Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie 44 (1933): 52–63.

Allgemeine Psychologie auf personalistischer Grundlage. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1935. Stern’s last major work. Translated by Howard Davis Spoerl as General Psychology from the Personalistic Standpoint (New York: Macmillan, 1938).

Der Briefwechsel zwischen William Stern und Jonas Cohn: Dokumente einer Freundschaft zwischen zwei Wissenschaftlern. Edited by Helmut E. Lück and Dieter-Jürgen Löwisch. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 1994. This book offers an extensive compilation of nearly all of the letters sent by William Stern to his friend and philosopher colleague Jonas Cohn over a period extending from 1893 to 1938.

OTHER SOURCES

Allport, Gordon W. “The Personalistic Psychology of William Stern.” Character and Personality 5 (1937): 231–246. Offers a concise exposition of Stern’s conception of the human personality.

———. “William Stern: 1871–1938.” American Journal of Psychology 51 (1938): 770–773. Allport’s appreciation of Stern, published in the year of Stern’s death.

Ash, Mitchell G. Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890–1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Bühring, Gerald. Titelbibliographie zu und über William Stern. 1996a. This is an unpublished bibliography of Stern’s works compiled by his biographer.

———. William Stern, oder, Streben nach Einheit. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 1996b. To date, the only published biography of Stern.

———. “Zur Rezeption William Sterns im Spiegel der Rezensionen.” Psychologie und Geschichte 8 (2000): 189–199.

Deutsch, Werner, ed. Über die verborgene Aktualität von William Stern. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 1991. A collection of essays originally prepared for a conference held in Berlin in 1988 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Stern’s death.

Ebbinghaus, Hermann. Psychology: An Elementary Text-Book. Translated and edited by Max Meyer. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1908.

Eckardt, Georg. “William Stern—Aspekte seines wissenschaftlichen Lebenswerkes.” Psychologie für die Praxis 7 (1989): 3–27.

Harrington, Anne. Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Lamiell, James T. Beyond Individual and Group Differences: Human Individuality, Scientific Psychology, and William Stern’s Critical Personalism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003. This work situates a renewal and extension of the author’s long-running critique of mainstream thinking in twentieth-century personality psychology.

———. “William Stern und der ‘Ursprungsmythos’ der Differentiellen Psychologie.” Journal für Psychologie 14 (2006): 253–273. This work documents Stern’s mounting criticism, during the 1920s and early 1930s, of psychologists’ ever-increasing reliance on standardized measurement operations and statistical analysis techniques.

Lamiell, James T., and Werner Deutsch. “In the Light of a Star: An Introduction to William Stern’s Critical Personalism.” Theory and Psychology 10 (2000): 715–730. This is the lead article in a special issue of Theory and Psychology containing nine additional articles discussing the relevance of Stern’s thinking to a variety of contemporary topics.

McCrae, R. R., and P. T. Costa Jr. “Trait Explanations in Personality Psychology.” European Journal of Personality 9 (1995): 231–252.

———. “Toward a New Generation of Personality Theories: Theoretical Contexts for the Five-Factor Model.” In The Five-Factor Model of Personality: Theoretical Perspectives, edited by Jerry S. Wiggins, 51–87. New York: Guilford, 1996.

———. “A Five-Factor Theory of Personality.” In Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, edited by Lawrence A. Pervin and Oliver P. John, 2nd ed., 139–153. New York: Guilford, 1999.

Michaelis-Stern, Eva. “Erinnerung an meine Eltern.” In Über die Verborgene Aktualität von William Stern, edited by Werner Deutsch, 131–141. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 1991. Eva Michaelis-Stern was the youngest of the three children born to Clara and William Stern.

Müller-Freienfels, Richard. Die Hauptrichtungen der gegenwärtigen Psychologie. Leipzig, Germany: Quelle and Meyer, 1933.

Münsterberg, Hugo. Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. Boston: Mifflin, 1913. This book firmly established the subdiscipline of psychotechnics in industrial and organizational psychology, even though it was Stern who had coined the term psychotechnics in 1903.

Ringer, Fritz. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.

Thorndike, Edward L. Individuality. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1911. In this work, Thorndike sketched a perspective on the scientific study of individuality that in important respects runs contrary to the views of Stern.

Toulmin, S., and D. E. Leary. “The Cult of Empiricism in Psychology, and Beyond.” In A Century of Psychology as Science, edited by Sigmund Koch and David E. Leary, 594–617. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985.

James T. Lamiell