Gardner Murphy

Gardner Murphy (1895 to 1979) was an American psychologist who worked in social and personality psychology and in parapsychology. Born in Chillicothe, Ohio, he graduated from Yale in 1916, took his master's at Harvard in 1917 and his doctorate at Columbia in 1923. He served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1944 and of the British Society for Psychical Research in 1949, and from 1952 was director of research at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka. His book Personality (1947) set out a biosocial theory built on the idea of canalization, in which needs are shaped by what, when and how they are satisfied. He also wrote Human Potentialities (1958) and is regarded as an early exponent of humanistic psychology.