Henry Murray

Henry Alexander Murray (May 13, 1893 – June 23, 1988) was an American psychologist at Harvard University.

In 1916, Murray married at age 23 to Josephine Lee Rantoul.

His academic pursuits at Harvard were lacking, but at Columbia University he excelled in medicine, completed his M.D. and also received an M.A. in biology in 1919.

For the following two years he was an instructor in physiology at Harvard.

In 1923, after seven years of marriage, he met and fell in love with Christiana Morgan; he experienced a serious conflict as he did not want to leave his wife.

This was a turning point in Murray's life as it raised his awareness of conflicting needs, the pressure that can result, and the links to motivation.

Carver and Scheier note that it was Morgan who was "fascinated by the psychology of Carl Jung" and it was as a result of her urging that he met Carl Jung in Switzerland.

He described Jung as "The first full blooded, spherical—and Goethean, I would say, intelligence I had ever met."

He was analyzed by him and studied his works.

"The experience of bringing a problem to a psychologist and receiving an answer that seemed to work had a great impact on Murray, leading him to seriously consider psychology as a career".

During his period at Harvard, Murray sat in on lectures by Alfred North Whitehead, whose process philosophy marked his philosophical and metaphysical thinking throughout his professional career.

In 1927, at the age of 33, Murray became assistant director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic.

He developed the concepts of latent needs (not openly displayed), manifest needs (observed in people's actions), "press" (external influences on motivation) and "Thema"—"a pattern of press and need that coalesces around particular interactions".

Murray collaborated with Stanley Cobb, Bullard Professor of Neuropathology at the Medical School, to introduce psychoanalysis into the Harvard curriculum but to keep those who taught it away from the decision-making apparatus in Vienna.

He received his doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge in 1928, aged 35.

Murray was Director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic in the School of Arts and Sciences after 1930.

Murray developed a theory of personality called personology, based on "need" and "press".

Murray was also a co-developer, with Christiana Morgan, of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), which he referred to as "the second best-seller that Harvard ever published, second only to the Harvard Dictionary of Music".

Murray was born in New York City into a wealthy family of Henry Alexander Murray Sr. and Fannie Morris Babcock, daughter of financier Samuel Denison Babcock.

Murray had an older sister and a younger brother.

Carver and Scheier note that "he got on well with his father but had a poor relationship with his mother", resulting in a deep-seated feeling of depression.

They hypothesize that the disruption of this relationship led Murray to be especially aware of people's needs and their importance as underlying determinants of behavior.

After Groton School he attended Harvard University, where he majored in history while competing in football, rowing and boxing.

He and Cobb set the stage for the founding of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society after 1931, but both were excluded from membership on political grounds.

In 1935, Murray and Morgan developed the concept of apperception and the assumption that everyone's thinking is shaped by subjective processes, the rationale behind the Thematic apperception test.

They used the term "apperception" to refer to the process of projecting fantasy imagery onto an objective stimulus.

In 1937, Murray became director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic.

In 1938 he published Explorations in Personality, a classic in psychology, which includes a description of the Thematic Apperception Test.

In 1938 Murray acted as a consultant for the British Government, setting up the Officer Selection Board.

Murray's work at The Harvard Psychological Clinic enabled him to apply his theories in the design of the selection processes with a "situation test", an assessment based on practical tasks and activities, an analysis of specific criteria (e.g. "leadership") by a number of raters across a range of activities.

Results were pooled to achieve an overall assessment.

During World War II, he left Harvard and worked as lieutenant colonel for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

James Miller, in charge of the selection of secret agents at the OSS during World War II, said the situation test was used by British War Officer Selection Board and OSS to assess potential agents.

In 1943 Murray helped complete Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler, commissioned by OSS boss Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan.

The report was done in collaboration with psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer, Ernst Kris, New School for Social Research, and Bertram D. Lewin, New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

The report used many sources to profile Hitler, including informants such as Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hermann Rauschning, Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, Gregor Strasser, Friedelind Wagner, and Kurt Ludecke.

The groundbreaking study was the pioneer of offender profiling and political psychology.

In addition to predicting that Hitler would choose suicide if defeat for Germany was near, Murray's collaborative report stated that Hitler was impotent as far as heterosexual relations were concerned and that there was a possibility that Hitler had participated in a homosexual relationship.

From 1959 to 1962, he conducted a series of psychologically damaging and purposefully abusive experiments on minors and undergraduate students.

One of those students was Ted Kaczynski, later known as the Unabomber.