Sometimes we speak as if each of us were a single individual, standing solitary, existing alone; but nothing of the sort is true. The smallest conceivable personality is threefold,—father, mother, child. No one of us starts as an individual or can ever after become such, being essentially social, a member merely, a part of a larger whole. (George Herbert Palmer in his Life of Alice Freeman Palmer.)
No matter how fully and freely an individual may reveal his secrets, he is not likely to be able to present himself as he is. He may describe his thoughts and his feelings, but he can hardly hope accurately to evaluate his capacities and his characteristics, or to appreciate the force of the various influences that are playing upon him. He may consider himself to have certain abilities, while his employer would estimate his talents quite differently. His relations with his church or with his family might show him to be almost another person from the individual he thinks himself to be, while employer, clergyman, and family would differ from one another in the pictures they would draw of him.
To approach an understanding of an individual and his problems one must view him from as many
