Use Psychological Theory, Don’t Let It Use You

Abstract

Abstract Foisting a psychological theory onto the subject of a psychobiography is a fatal mistake. Instead, theory should open up, not close down; provide new questions, not easy answers; complicate, not simplify; generate possibilities, not reductions. No one theory should be thought of as the exclusive way of understanding a subject. William James noted, “[N]either the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the particular position in which he [or she] stands.” Hence psychobiographers can draw fertile concepts from the body of psychological theory and use them as the information about the subject seems to indicate their applicability. A particular trap is psychiatric diagnosis because it simplifies people when we want to gain access to their complexity. Individuals looked at in this chapter include Gandhi, Lincoln, Ingmar Bergman, and anti-Apartheid activists Albertina Nontsikelelo Sisulu and Ruth Heloise First.

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