The final analytic chapter presents the ultimate example: Marie Jahoda, who embodied virtues that are praised in earlier chapters. She was the author of a classic study looking at the effects of mass unemployment the early 1930s. In her report she made telling use of examples to depict the lives of those whom she and her team studied. Just as her examples overspill any theory of unemployment, so the reasons why Jahoda sets an example overspill her abilities to use examples. She understood the tensions between theory and examples, coming down strongly on the side of the latter, recognizing the importance of ‘descriptive fieldwork’. She argued that psychologists were over-valuing theory. She wrote directly with minimum jargon and maximum clarity, believing in the importance of studying the lives of individuals. Jahoda’s use of examples and her suspicion of theory in psychology were just two aspects of a wider humane vision.

This chapter introduces the book’s basic themes: the importance of examples in psychological writing; the tension between the abstraction of theories and the concreteness of examples; how examples overspill theories; and the need to argue for these themes concretely with examples, rather than abstractly with theories. This is why the book has a dual vision. It looks back historically to examples of past psychologists and their ways of writing, and it does this to find examples of writers that psychologists of today might follow. In this introductory chapter, the later chapters of past writers are summarised. There are obvious candidates of great psychological writers, such as William James and Sigmund Freud, but the book also includes forgotten figures, such as the third Earl of Shaftesbury and one of the heroes of this book - the neglected eighteenth-century advocate of examples, Abraham Tucker.