Lawrence K. Frank

"In similar fashion we may approach the personality and induce the individual to reveal his way of organizing experience by giving him a field (objects, materials, experiences) with relatively little structure and cultural patterning so that the personality can project upon that plastic field his way of seeing life, his meanings, significances, patterns, and especially his feelings, Thus we elicit a projection of the individuals private world, because he has to organize the field, interpret the material, and react affectively to it. More specifically, a projection method for study of personality involves the presentation of a stimulus-situation designed or chosen because it will mean to the subject, not what the experimenter has arbitrarily decided it should mean (as in most psychological experiments using standardized stimuli in order to be “objective”), but rather whatever it must mean to the personality who gives it, or imposes it, his private, idiosyncratic meaning and organization. The subject then will respond to his meaning of the presented stimulus-situation by some form of action and feeling that is expressive of his personality."

"When we scrutinize the actual procedures that may be called projective methods we find a wide variety of techniques and material being employed for the same general purpose, to obtain from the subject what he cannot or will not say, frequently because he does not know himself and is not aware what he is revealing about himself through his projections."

"A policy therefor might be likened to strategy, the broad, overall, long term conception which gives direction and purpose to the tactics of immediately daily operations and decisions."

"While he served as a foundation officer, he fostered studies of child growth and development, adolescents, family living, and aging; parent education programs; and nursery schools. He was long active in the field of mental health, stressing what is now called "Primary Prevention, "and emphasizing the importance of mental health programs in schools and colleges."

"We are living the events which for centuries to come will be minutely studied by scholars who will undoubtedly describe these days as probably the most exciting and creative in the history of mankind. But preoccupied with our daily chores, our worries and personal hopes and ambitions, few of us are actually living in the present."

"Frank was one of the two or three men who used foundations the way the Lord meant them to be used."

"The concept of teleological mechanisms, however it be expressed in many terms, may be viewed as an attempt to escape from these older mechanistic formulations that now appear inadequate, and to provide new and more fruitful conceptions and more effective methodologies for studying self-regulating processes, self-orienting systems and organisms, and self-directing personalities. Thus, the terms feedback, servomechanisms, circular systems, and circular processes may be viewed as different but equivalent expressions of much the same basic conception"

"Coming directly to the topic of projective methods of personality study, we may say that the dynamic conception of personality as a process of organizing experience and structuralizing life space in a field leads to the problem of how we can reveal the way an individual personality organizes experience, in order to disclose or at least gain insight into that individuals private world of meanings, significances, patterns, and feelings."

"A policy is a formulation of long term goals and purposes and of the values and aspirations by which those goals and purposes are not only defined but are to be translated into activities and practices. Thus a policy is an affirmation, perhaps a reaffirmation, of what may be taken for granted or is implied, but what is frequently ignored or neglected or inadequately recognized in plans and programs and customary operations. Sometimes a policy serves to point out where these goals and purposes and these values are being blocked or sacrificed to various short-term ends or convenience."

"[I call for] imagination and courage in the endless endeavor to make human life more meaningful and significant, more nearly expressive of the values we cherish... A national policy for the family will earn affirmation and as such should give re-direction to what we are now doing in our social life, and new hope and inspiration to individual men and women and new promise to youth."

"We exist in the geographical environment, moving about in space-time, as we carry on our continual intercourse with nature, through breathing, drinking, eating, absorbing light, heat and other forms of radiant energy, eliminating through breathing, urination and defecation, through the skin and by radiation of heat, as the geographical environment flows in and out of us, as it does in all other organisms."

"With the death of Lawrence K. Frank on September 23, 1968, one of the founders and major catalysts of the child development movement was lost to the field."