Henry Murray

Henry Alexander Murray (May 13, 1893 – June 23, 1988) was an American psychologist at Harvard University. 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. 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. 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. He received his doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge in 1928, aged 35. In 1916, Murray married at age 23. 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, Josephine. 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.