SUMNER, FRANCIS CECIL
Sully became a neglected figure even in his own life-
Copyright American Psychological Association. Not for further distribution.
515
psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Alfred
time because psychology, which now looked only to
the controlled experiment for certainty, had turned
its back on other equally fruitful sources of ideas.
Bibliography
Sully, J. (1x77). Pessim:sm. London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trubner. Although strongly critical of the German pes-
simist movement, this work was said to have lost Sully
the chair of philosophy at Liverpool; the appointing
committee thought that someone interested in such a
topic might have an equally gloomy outlook on life that
would be inappropriate for the then fledgling institu-
tion.
Sully, J. (1881).Illusion:;: A psychological study. London: Ke-
gan Paul. Trench, Trubner. This is an early psycholog-
ical exploration of errors of perception, memory, and
reasoning.
Sully, J. (1884). Outlines of psychobgy. London: Longmans
Green. This book is the most successful and accessible
summary of Sully’s work and ideas on key psycholog-
ical topics such as sensation, perception, memory,
thinking, and development.
Sully, J. (1x92). The human mind: A text-book of psychology.
(Vols. 1-2). London: Longmans Green. This book pro-
vides the fullest account of Sully’s approach to psy-
chology.
Sully, J. (1895). Studics of childhood. London: Longmans
Green. This work hoks at child development from an
evolutionary perpective; it also contains some original
studies on children’sdrawings.
Sully, J. (1918). My and friends: A psychologist’s memo-
ries. London: Fisher Unwin. This autobiography con-
tains reminiscences of the people and events that
shaped Sully’s intellectual and social life, though giving
away little about his own thinking.
A. D.Lovie and I? Lovie
SUMNER, FRANCIS CECIL (1895-1954), first African
American to receive a doctor of philosophy degree in
psychology in the Ucited States. Born in Pine Bluff, Ar-
kansas, Sumner attended elementary schools in Nor-
folk, Virginia, and Plainfield, New Jersey. Secondary ed-
ucation for Blacks was rare in the early I ~ O O S , and
Sumner did not have a formal high school education.
Admitted to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1911
by examination, Sumner graduated in 1915 with a
bachelor of arts magna cum laude and received a mas-
ter of arts from Lincoln in 1917. Sumner entered Clark
IJniversity that same year and was awarded a doctorate
in 1920. during a period in which innumerable social
and physical factors mitigated against such achieve-
ments for Black Americans. Under the tutelage of G.
Stanley Hall, Sumner defended his dissertation on the
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/10522-216
Encyclopedia of Psychology, Vol. 7, edited by A. E. Kazdin
Copyright © 2000 American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.
Adler-work that was hailed as an outstanding inter-
pretation of their theories. Sumner was Hall’s last doc-
toral advisee.
Following his graduation he became a professor of
psychology and spent his entire professional career
teaching in America’s racially segregated Black colleges
and universities. He was a professor of psychology at
Wilberforce College (Ohio) and Southern University
(Louisiana) before chairing the psychology departments
at West Virginia Collegiate Institute (now West Virginia
State University) and Howard University (Washington,
D.C.). Sumner’s greatest contributions were in the area
of training and preparing future Black psychologists.
When appointed head of the burgeoning psychology
department at Howard in 1928, he recognized the op-
portunity to increase the numbers of Black psycholo-
gists and developed curricula to accomplish this goal.
He established classrooms and laboratories to facilitate
his plan. Sumner was a leader, innovator, teacher, and
mentor for many students. During World War I1 the
Howard program produced more Black psychologists
than all other American colleges and universities com-
bined. Sumner’s model programs at Howard led the
way for other Black psychologists in America’s Black
universities. For many years, Sumner maintained and
distributed an annual newsletter, which reported the
progress of Howard‘s psychology graduates and pro-
vided historical data that detailed the work of Howard’s
Black psychologists.
Sumner was a generalist, and his research efforts
were limited. He had a long-term interest, however, in
the relationships among psychology, religion, and the
administration of justice. He was among the first aca-
demicians to contribute to the understanding of each
of these areas of study. His contributions to psychology
and religion can be seen in his massive unpublished
manuscript titled “The Structure of Religion: A History
of European Psychology of Religion” (Howard Univer-
sity, 1934). He was the first to establish courses in the
psychology of religion in the Black colleges and uni-
versities. His research assessing the attitudes of more
than 2,000 Black and white college students toward the
administration of justice was regarded as seminal. Per-
formed by Black researchers, this study called for legal
procedures that would facilitate the administration of
justice on a more democratic basis. Sumner continued
as a professor until the last year of his life, 1954, the
year in which the Supreme Court outlawed the “sepa-
rate but equal” doctrine.
Bibliography
Works by Sumner
Sumner. F. C. (1922). Psychoanalysis of Freud and Adler
on sex determination and character formation. Peda-
 516 SUPER, DONALD EDWIN
gogicul Seminary. 24, 139-168. Dissertation submitted
by Sumner for his doctorate at Clark University.
Sumner, F. C., & Shaed, D. L., (1945). Negro-white attitudes
towards the administration of justice as affecting Ne-
groes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 29, 368-377.
Works about Sumner
Guthrie. R. V. (1998). Even the rat was white: A historical
view of psychology (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Includes a chapter outlining the life and accomplish-
ments of Sumner and the complete listing of his
publications.
Robert V. Guthrie
Copyright American Psychological Association. Not for further distribution.
SUPER, DONALD EDWIN (1910-1gg4). vocational
psychologist. In 1950, Super began a program of re-
search that eventually expanded the domain of voca-
tional psychology from a narrow focus on choosing oc-
cupations to a broad vista on developing careers.
During the first half of the twentieth century, voca-
tional psychologists concentrated on a “matching
model” for vocational guidance that emphasized the
use of interest inventories, ability tests, and occupa-
tional information to help adolescents and young adults
make initial occupational choices. Super contributed
significantly to this model for matching people to po-
sitions, and his first two books codified existing knowl-
edge about vocational guidance (Dynamics of Occupa-
tional Adjustment, New York, 1942) and vocational
assessment (Appraising Vocational Fitness, New York,
1949).
Following the publication of these books, Super in-
itiated a program of research that would, in due course,
extend vocational psychology’s purview from matching
adolescents with occupations to developing careers over
the life span. Super’s most cited journal article, ‘X The-
ory of Vocational Development” (American Psychologist,
1953), presented the initial statement of his career the-
ory. His definitive book, The Psychology of Careers (New
York, 1g57), more fully expounded the theory and of-
fered empirical support for its ten propositions. The the-
ory was tested and revised in a myriad of manuscripts
and measures resulting from the Career Pattern Study
(CPS) in which Super and his colleagues investigated
the natural history of careers as they unfolded in the
lives of IOO men over a period of 40 years.
In all of this work, Super’s singular insight involved
using models and methods from developmental psy-
chology to conceptualize and study empirically the life
course of careers through stages of growth, explora-
tion, establishment, maintenance, and disengagement.
He linguistically explicated and operationally defined
each career stage by its characteristic vocational devel-
opment tasks and coping behaviors. He coined the term
“career maturity” to denote individuals’ attitudinal and
cognitive readiness to master the developmental tasks
of their life stage. The CPS staff devised numerous mea-
sures of career maturity still used by researchers and
counselors. Most notably, Super and his colleagues con-
structed the Career Development Inventory to measure
adolescents’ attitudes toward exploring occupations
and making plans, as well as their competence in using
occupational information to choose from among edu-
cational and vocational options.
After his retirement in 1975 from Teachers College,
Columbia University, where he worked for 30 years, Su-
per dedicated the next years to expanding once again
the purview of vocational psychology, this time from
careers to life roles. To address life roles across the life
span, Super constructed a heuristic model that portrays
work as a salient but single arc in a rainbow of roles
in the community, at home, and with friends. In col-
laboration with colleagues from 12 countries, Super de-
veloped a life-span, life-space framework that is used to
research and develop careers of diverse individuals in
manifold settings (Life Roles, Values. and Career, San
Francisco, 1995). For these accomplishments, and
many more, the American Psychological Association
presented Super with the 1983 Distinguished Scientific
Award for Contributions to Applied Psychology.
Bibliography
Savickas, M. L. (Ed.). (1994). From vocational guidance to
career counseling: Essays to honor Donald E. Super. Ca-
reer Development Quarterly, 43, (I). Includes Super’s bi-
ography, a complete list of his publications from I932
to 1994, and eight articles about his contributions to
psychology.
Super, D. E. (1983). Assessment in career guidance:
Toward truly developmental counseling. Personnel and
Guidance Journal, 61, 5-562. Outlines Super’s career
counseling model and methods.
Super, D. E. (1985). Coming of age in Middletown: Careers
in the making. American Psychologist, 40, 405-414. De-
scribes the Career Pattern Study.
Super, D. E.. Savickas, M. L., & Super, C. M. (1996). The
lifespan, life-space approach to careers. In D. Brown &
L. Brooks (Eds.). Career choice and development: Applying
contemporary theories to practice (3rd ed., pp. 121-178).
San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Explains Super’s life-
span, life-space theory.
Murk L. Savickas
SUPEREGO. According to psychoanalytic theory, the
superego is the seat of conscience, ideals and values,