The Ninth Street Center

Albert Wellek
Polarity in Character Structure
A System of Characterology
reviewed by

Since swallowing all books by Paul Rosenfels, I now hardly ever read anything about psychology. I merely monitor progress in psychology, and I try to understand the history of polarity awareness.

Albert Wellek (1904-1972) was aware enough of polarity, and took it seriously enough, to outline a typology of human nature. His 360 pages read like an attempt to sum up and systematize everything he had found out about psychology.

Wellek's central idea is that the human personality has many different layers, like an onion. Beyond this truism, however, Wellek goes astray in a really bad way when he tries to define layers and areas, coats, cores and bases in the human personality -- all terms that have no real meaning or function. His research is less based on observation, and more an intellectual exercise.

Footnotes, glossary, and tables at the end of the book take up almost 70 pages. Wellek offers extensive tables of what a Rosenfelsian would consider analogues -- but most of these terms he invented himself to complete his system, not because they might be useful.

I lost interest after just a few dozen pages (and so did the previous owner of my copy, who stopped underlining interesting parts after page 29). What I missed most are any real problems -- the only question Wellek is trying to answer is how many layers the human personality has.

I find it difficult to assess his actual importance, and I am certainly being unfair here. This book might have made a good private notebook. As a starting point for people interested in polarity or human nature, it might cause more confusion than understanding.

Wellek's other works focus on music theory, especially synesthetics, and gestalt theory. His short introduction to psychology, Psychologie (1963), is more entertaining and readable than his attempt at explaining polarity.

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