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This chapter is written in four major sections. The first provides some historical background to mainstream psychology's approach to the areas traditionally designated as ""personality and assessment." The second section focuses on limitations and other difficulties of contemporary notions and practices. The themes running through the first two sections have to do with established psychologists' inclinations to look upon human affairs in terms of natural laws operating independently of human consciousness. From the perspective of other psychologists, who regard humans as being not only objects of nature but also as being active subjects, the predominant view is not so much wrong as it is incomplete. The incompleteness, however, can have deleterious consequences when it takes the form of either: (a) an explicit reduction of all human events to mechanics and/or electrochemistry, or (b) an implicit technologized comprehension—which occurs in the absence of formal recognition of specifically human characteristics.

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