The authors of this book, as teachers and professional psychologists, have as their major professional responsibility the interpretation and application of psychology to their students and clients. In this task they have sometimes found themselves deeply disturbed and confused by the conflicts existing in the accumulated knowledge of their science. While psychological research has produced a tremendous number of facts, trustworthy principles which would make possible the prediction and control of individual behavior have often been lacking. Since our students are for the most part preparing to enter professions such as education, clinical psychology and related fields, where the ability to predict and control behavior is essential, we have been impelled to a search for a frame of reference which would assist both our students and ourselves to a clearer and more meaningful understanding of human behavior.

Both authors in their training were deeply indoctrinated by a behavioristic approach which has not always proved adequate to this purpose. Each of us has been operating in different t areas of applied psychology for some time. In the course of this experience we, like many other psychologists, have been led to certain strikingly similar conclusions. With the opportunity presented by the development of this book, and the mutual stimulation afforded by such a task we have developed a frame of reference which has proved useful not only to us but to our students and clients as well. We have experimented with its use over a period of eight years in such fields as clinical psychology, educational psychology, mental hygiene, psychology of personality, and the psychology of learning. It has served us well in these areas. It is presented here in the hope that it may prove equally useful to others.

The frame of reference we have developed is a more complete exposition of the basic postulates of a phenomenological system of psychology first proposed by Snygg in 1941 and published in the Psychological Review. It is our belief that psychology has been approaching some such interpretation for a number of years. Historically, this approach seems to have been given its initial impetus through the work of Freud and his followers. Among the many psychologists who have made recent and significant contributions to this approach are Lecky and Gardner Murphy. A great many others, operating more or less independently, have been approaching such a phenomenological point of view toward behavior. Almost every current issue of the various psychological journals carries some reference or interpretation which has more or less bearing on this frame of reference. To us, this volume represents but one more step in what we have come to feel is an inevitable trend in psychology.

In attempting a frame of reference for the entire field of psychology in a single volume it has been necessary to impose mutual restraints upon ourselves and each other to avoid permitting our enthusiasms to carry us away. A new frame of reference makes new uses of the tremendous body of already existing psychological research. In a volume of this size it is obviously impossible to give credit to all of the research workers and theorists whose work has contributed to the development of such an approach. We have not always found it possible to trace ideas and concepts to the numerous original contributions on which they may be based. So large a body of experimental work has bearing upon this frame of reference that it has been impossible to document many aspects of this approach as adequately as we desire.

Among the many people who have read this manuscript in its early stages, we are particularly indebted to Carl Rogers, Nicholas Hobbs, Lucien Kinney, and Gardner Murphy for a number of valuable contributions to our thinking. We are indebted to Victor Raimy for the loan of his doctoral dissertation, some of the concepts of which are basic in our thinking, and to our students who have greatly helped us in the clarification of our ideas. We should like also to express our appreciation to the American Psychological Association for permission to quote from its journals.

The reader will note that this volume is divided into three parts. In Part I we have set forth the fundamental aspects of the phenomenological system we propose. Part II is devoted to an exploration of some of the most important implications for applied psychology as these appear to us. Part III is devoted to a discussion of the relation of a phenomenological system to more traditional points of view. As an outline of a theory we expect that, like everything else in science, this frame of reference we propose may undergo shifts and changes as it is subjected to wider consideration. As fallible human beings we can only hope that this is "if not the truth, then very like the truth."