George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

Excerpt

In Capriccio, his 15th and last opera, Richard Strauss has a poet and musician vying for the favors of Countess Magdalena in a contest that ends in an inevitable draw. In his swan song, Strauss chose to address the fundamental issue facing any opera composer concerning the creative tension between words and music or reason and emotion. In psychology, an analogous tension exists between numbers (quantitative research aimed at explaining behavior) and case studies (nomothetic investigations focused on understanding the experiences of a single individual). It would be reasonable to expect that personality, social, and developmental psychologists, whose focus of inquiry is the socially constructed person (as opposed to the biological organism), routinely generate their hypotheses and test their truthfulness using the litmus test of individual lives. …