Prescott Lecky (November 1, 1892 – May 30, 1941) was a lecturer of

Psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

from 1924 to 1934. At a time when American psychology was dominated by

behaviorism Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent (behavioral psychology), antecedent stimuli in the environment, o ...

, he developed the concept of

self-help Self-help or self-improvement is a self-guided improvement''APA Dictionary of Physicology'', 1st ed., Gary R. VandenBos, ed., Washington: American Psychological Association, 2007.—economically, intellectually, or emotionally—often with a subst ...

as a method in psychotherapy of the self in the 1920s. His concepts influenced

Maxwell Maltz Maxwell Maltz (March 10, 1899 – April 7, 1975) was an American cosmetic surgeon and author of ''Psycho-Cybernetics'' (1960), which was a system of ideas that he claimed could improve one's self-image leading to a more successful and fulfilling l ...

in his writing of the classic

self-help book A self-help book is one that is written with the intention to instruct its readers on solving personal problems. The books take their name from ''Self-Help'', an 1859 best-seller by Samuel Smiles, but are also known and classified under "self-im ...

Psycho-Cybernetics ''Psycho-Cybernetics'' is a self-help book written by Maxwell Maltz in 1960. Motivational and self-help experts in personal development, including Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy have based their techniques on Maxwell Maltz. Many of the p ...

. George Kelly, in his book The Psychology of Personal Constructs, also credits Lecky as an influence. Lecky stressed the

defense mechanism In psychoanalytic theory, a defence mechanism (American English: defense mechanism), is an unconscious psychological operation that functions to protect a person from anxiety-producing thoughts and feelings related to internal conflicts and o ...

of resistance as an individual's method of regulating his self-concept. Lecky's self-consistency theory is that self-consistency is a primary motivating force in human behavior. Lecky's theory concerned the organization of ideas of the self and the self's overall need for a "master" motive that serves to maintain for the self a consistency in ideas. Self-consistency theory remains relevant to contemporary

personality Personality is the characteristic sets of behaviors, cognitions, and emotional patterns that are formed from biological and environmental factors, and which change over time. While there is no generally agreed-upon definition of personality, mos ...

and clinical psychologists. He was well known as a psychologist and counseled

John F. Kennedy John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK and the nickname Jack, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination ...

when he was having trouble at

Choate Choate may refer to: Places Canada * Choate, British Columbia, a locality in the Fraser Canyon of British Columbia, Canada * , a lake in the Cariboo region of British Columbia, Canada United States * Choate Mental Health and Development Center, a ...

preparatory school. His students gathered together his ideas and posthumously published them as ''Self Consistency: a theory of personality'' in 1945.online version
/ref> Lecky was born in

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth ar ...

and died in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. He's buried at Hollywood Cemetery in

Richmond, Virginia (Thus do we reach the stars) , image_map = , mapsize = 250 px , map_caption = Location within Virginia , pushpin_map = Virginia#USA , pushpin_label = Richmond , pushpin_m ...

Footnotes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lecky, Prescott 20th-century American psychologists 1892 births 1941 deaths Columbia University faculty

See also

Footnotes