"The experience of bringing a problem to a psychologist and receiving an answer that seemed to work had a great impact on Murray, leading him to seriously consider psychology as a career".

[6] During his period at Harvard, Murray sat in on lectures by Alfred North Whitehead, whose process philosophy marked his philosophical and metaphysical thinking throughout his professional career.

[citation needed] Murray collaborated with Stanley Cobb, Bullard Professor of Neuropathology at the Medical School, to introduce psychoanalysis into the Harvard curriculum but to keep those who taught it away from the decision-making apparatus in Vienna.

[citation needed] During World War II, he left Harvard and worked as lieutenant colonel for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

In 1943 Murray helped complete Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler, commissioned by OSS boss Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan.

The report was done in collaboration with psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer, Ernst Kris, New School for Social Research, and Bertram D. Lewin, New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

The report used many sources to profile Hitler, including informants such as Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hermann Rauschning, Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, Gregor Strasser, Friedelind Wagner, and Kurt Ludecke.

[9] Alston Chase's book Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist connects Kaczynski's abusive experiences under Murray to his later criminal career.

[11] Some sources have suggested that Murray's experiments were part of, or indemnified by, the United States government's research into mind control, known as the MKUltra project.

[15] He later married Caroline "Nina" Fish, a child psychologist at Boston University[14] and the Massachusetts Mental Health Center who was a former student of Jean Piaget.

[citation needed] Personology was a holistic approach that studied the person at many levels of complexity all at the same time by an interdisciplinary team of investigators.

To properly analyze the entire life cycle, Murray favored a narrative approach to studying personality, which he called "personology".

The personological system has been used as an approach for multiple academic disciplines: philosophy, humanism, biological chemistry, and societal and cultural studies.

(2) People act to reduce physiological and psychological tension to gain satisfaction, but do not strive to be tension-free, and rather cycle between seeking excitement, activity and movement in their lives and then relaxing.

Murray's theory of personality is rooted in psychoanalysis, and the chief business and aim of personology is the reconstruction of the individual's past life experiences in order to explain their present behavior.

Murray was portrayed by Brian d'Arcy James in Manhunt: Unabomber, the 2017 docudrama miniseries created by Andrew Sodroski, Jim Clemente and Tony Gittelson.