The Life of Allport

Gordon Allport reports being isolated from children and did not fit in with his older three brothers as a child. However, little more is revealed by him about his childhood besides having a father who was a physician and a mother who had rigid spiritual beliefs. Allport was later to believe that childhood events do not affect normally healthy adults. Gordon Allport felt inferior to others on into adulthood, even when he became a noted psychologist. Allport attended Harvard and was active as a volunteer for a boy’s club, a group of factory workers, and a contingent of foreign students.

Allport met Freud in Vienna while visiting one of his brothers. Freud took the meeting as an opportunity to offer Allport a quick analysis for Allport. Allport resented this intrusion by Freud and later believed that psychoanalysis probed too deeply into the unconscious. Allport’s theory would reflect this opinion in his own theory of personality which he believed we should pay more attention to conscious or visible motivations.

Allport completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1922 and studied further in Germany and England. Gordon Allport spent forty years teaching at Harvard and received many distinguished honors for his contributions to the field of psychology.