Dan Ogilvie

 

Title: Professor Emeritus

Area: Social Psychology

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I received my Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1967. I was on the faculty at Harvard for a few years and came to Livingston College in 1970. Although my degree is in social psychology, my primary area of specialty is personality psychology. My penchant for personality psychology is represented in a book published in 2004 titled "Fantasies of Flight". It features "case studies" of some individuals who created images of levitated objects (e.g., J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan; Marc Chagall, Russian artist whose paintings included distorted villages and bodies in flight). The purpose of the book is to create a more healthy balance than currently exists between studying people as carriers of variables and taking on the difficult challenge of "whole life" research. Since the completion of that project, I have rejuvenated an earlier interest in self-discrepancy theory and research. I endeavored to contribute to the field 20 years ago by introducing the "undesired self", a concept that I argued warranted equal footing along side the "ideal self" and the "ought self". My words went unnoticed, so I'm back and generating research that will be more difficult to ignore.