Career
At a time when American psychology was dominated by behaviorism, he developed the concept of self-help as a method in psychotherapy of the self in the 1920s. His concepts influenced Maxwell Maltz in his writing of the classic self-help book, Psycho-Cybernetics. Lecky stressed the defense mechanism of resistance as an individual"s method of regulating his self-concept.
Lecky"s self-consistency theory is that self-consistency is a primary motivating force in human behavior.
Lecky"s theory concerned the organization of ideas of the self and the self"s overall need for a "master" motive that serves to maintain for the self a consistency in ideas. Self-consistency theory remains relevant to contemporary personality and clinical psychologists.
He was well known as a psychologist and counseled John F. Kennedy when he was having trouble at Choate preparatory school. His students gathered together his ideas and posthumously published them as Self Consistency: a theory of personality in 1945.