This article presents an invited commentary on the two previous articles by Hermans and Bonarius (1991) and by Hermans (1991). Primary focus is placed on certain enduring confusions regarding the historic ‘nomothetic vs. idiographic’ controversy in personality psychology, the traces of those confusions in the writings of Hermans and Bonarius, and the importance of eliminating those confusions if the full potential of valuation theory and the self‐confrontation method is to be realized, not only as a means of gaining idiographic knowledge and clinically helpful insights, but also as a means of gaining genuinely nomothetic knowledge in the domain of personality.
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