Psychobiography

Abstract

Abstract This book explains what makes for effective, accurate, compelling psychobiography. Psychobiography refers to the study, using psychological perspectives, of the lives of notable figures in history, politics, intellectual life, the arts, and other fields. The essence of psychobiography is gaining access to the inner world of the subjects: Why did they act as they did? What are their inner motivations, strivings, and preoccupations? Research is the basis of psychobiography. Materials such as letters, diaries, dreams, Freudian slips, and fantasies are especially revealing and therefore useful for psychological analysis. Authors of psychobiographies inevitably have a relationship with their subjects; they must be able to gain insight through this relationship without being thrown off by either idealizing or denigrating their subjects. It is essential to take into account the subject’s culture: if an author today writes about a person who lived years ago, that person’s culture inevitably was significantly different from the author’s. Foisting a psychological theory onto the subject is a fatal mistake. Instead, theory should open up, not close down; provide new questions, not easy answers; complicate, not simplify. It is valuable for psychobiographers to learn about their subjects’ narrative identities—the way individuals feel about themselves, as expressed in the stories they tell about themselves. The ultimate challenge for authors, once they have information about the subject and have guidelines in mind, is to analyze their subjects. Some methods are recommended. One is Irving Alexander’s “Identifiers of Salience.” Another method, “multiplex analysis,” results in creating an explanatory structure that is an interacting, reinforcing whole.

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