Self-Consistency: A Theory of Personality

Prescott Lecky lectured in psychology at Columbia University from 1924 to 1934, and this book sets out the theory of personality he developed there. Its central claim is that self-consistency is a primary motivating force in human behaviour, so that personality is organised around a master motive to keep one's ideas of oneself consistent. On that account the self is an organisation of ideas, and Lecky stressed resistance as the means by which a person regulates and defends that self-concept. He worked this out at a time when American psychology was dominated by behaviourism, and he developed self-help as a method in psychotherapy of the self during the nineteen twenties. Lecky died in 1941, and his students gathered his ideas together and published them posthumously; the library record describes a volume of some two hundred and seventy-five pages on personality. His concepts influenced Maxwell Maltz in the writing of Psycho-Cybernetics, and George Kelly credited Lecky as an influence on The Psychology of Personal Constructs.

Written from the encyclopaedia article on Prescott Lecky at Wikipedia with the library catalogue record for the 1961 edition at the Internet Archive.

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