The Psychologist as Biographer
Homo sapiens is the biographical animal. Humans differ from other creatures not only in anticipating their group and individual future but in reviewing and recounting their personal past—and in being fascinated by the personal pasts of other humans.
Even in cultures where formal biography has remained undeveloped, details of individual life history are shared and spread by gossip, rumor, and personal confession.
In our culture, the biographical impulse still operates much of the time at this
informal level.
But a tradition of formal biography has evolved as well, beginning with Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.
In this tradition, the biographer studies an individual’s life and prepares an orderly account of it.
Factual accuracy is balanced with an attempt to tell a good story.
The biographer not only lists the surface events of the life but seeks to identify the subject’s primary motives, goals, or ambitions.
Lessons for the reader may be pointed out, or left for the reader to discover.
Over the centuries, biography has shifted in style and emphasis.
Its formal tone has increasingly yielded to a casual or even racy voice.
For much of its history it was largely hagiographic, recording the saintly qualities of genuine or putative saints.
Then it developed at least a pretense of being “objective”—a pretense that often served as pretext for the latest compilation of malicious gossip.
Perhaps the most dramatic changes in the very essence of biography took place when broad theories of personality, developed by psychiatrists and psychologists,
began to be adopted by biographers.
Psychological approaches to biography flowered in the 1920s and 1930s, languished for several decades, then flourished anew in the 1970s and 1980s.
Early on, these approaches acquired a generic name: psychobiography.
The word psychobiography looks innocent enough.
It’s a syllable or two too long to come trippingly off the tongue, but it gets easier with practice.
It has good Greek roots, which separately entered the English language a long time ago.
And it means pretty much what it says: biography that makes substantial use of
psychological theory and knowledge.
But even as the approaches it describes have gained rapidly in numbers of
practitioners and readers, psychobiography has become a dirty word.
Critics now apply it with a sneer to any biography whose inferences strike them as dubious. George Will’s definition is representative:
In “psychobiography” the large deeds of great individuals are “explained” with reference to some hitherto unsuspected sexual inclination or incapacity, which in turn is “explained” by some slight the individual suffered at a tender age—say, 7, when his mother took away a lollipop.1
Entire books have been written to denounce psychobiography and its sibling
psychohistory as conceived in sin.2
Even scholars who conduct careful psychobiographical research often prefer more innocuous labels for their work: Life history. Narratology. Psychological biography.
Some of those who denounce psychobiography would still reject it no matter what it’s called or how carefully it’s done.
They yearn for a bygone world of genteel biographers and unblemished heroes.
But psychobiography has not been an innocent spectator at the sharp decline of its own reputation.
Its biggest problem is obvious: Bad psychobiography is easier to write than good psychobiography.
Psychobiography may be written for the wrong reasons or for no good reason.
It may rely on shoddy data or misguided methods or inappropriate theories, or all of those together.
Writers have used psychobiography to grind axes from the right (for example, Nancy Clinch on the Kennedy family3) and from the left (for example, Fawn Brodie on Richard Nixon4).
Writers have claimed to augment their biographies with serious psychological analysis, when all they’ve done is to shove famous people into pathological pigeonholes (for example, Albert Goldman’s diagnosis of Elvis Presley as a “split personality” and a “delusional paranoid”5).
I’ve never encountered a real psychobiographical explanation quite as silly as George Will’s fictional Lollipop Hypothesis.
But reductions of an adult personality to the child’s earliest and crudest motives happen often enough for Erik Erikson to have given the process a gently sarcastic label: “originology.”6
The first originologist was Sigmund Freud, who practiced his trade on such complex geniuses as Leonardo and Goethe.
Freud usually displayed at least a modicum of restraint in his applications of originology to genius.
Many later psychoanalysts and pseudoanalysts have applied Freud to biography with such abandon that the term “Freudian biography” is now an even more derogatory term than “psychobiography.”
Ironically, Freud himself has become a prime target of such Freudian excesses.
One writer has built an elaborate analysis of Freud’s personality and theories on
the teetering foundation of the punchline to one of Freud’s jokes.
According to this writer, the punchline contains a concealed reference to the secret sins of Freud’s father, which were somehow sensed and then repressed by Sigmund the child.7
Another writer continues to argue that Freud’s major theories must have derived from a hypothesized affair between Freud and his wife’s sister, which led to a supposed attempt by Freud to procure an alleged abortion of the postulated child his sister-in-law had presumably conceived.8
Still another writer has interpreted various remarks in Freud’s letters and books to mean that Freud was an “obsessed murderer” with a “necrophiliac passion” for his victims.9
Little wonder that in order to avoid being lumped with biographers as imaginative as these, more data-bound researchers run for cover.
But running for cover is not the best response to bad psychobiography.
The best response is good psychobiography.
The best response to traditionalists’ demands for less psychology in biography is more and better psychology.
The best response to the gradual takeover of psychobiography by people who don’t know what they’re doing is a takeover by people who do know what they’re doing.
Eighty-five years ago, Freud told Jung it was time for psychoanalysts to “take hold of biography.”10 Freud produced the first psychobiography less than a year later, and biography has not been the same since.
Now it’s time to issue a similar call to psychologists: “Take hold of psychobiography!”
Psychobiography is not only a way of doing biography; it’s a way of doing psychology.
Most psychologists have been trained to stay as far as they can from looking at one whole human being or one life at a time.
But they can learn a lot about psychology by taking such a look, and by doing it over and over again.
At the same time, they can bring a great deal to the field of psychobiography.
The domination of psychobiography by psychoanalysts has produced a modest
number of capable works, a few masterpieces, and some genuine disasters.
Good psychobiographies have been written by psychoanalytically-inspired political scientists, historians, and literary scholars.
The personal qualities needed to become a decent psychobiographer can be found in any field: a controlled empathy for the subject and a devotion to collecting solid biographical data.
Nonetheless, leaving psychobiography largely to psychoanalysts and their disciples has not yielded a coherent, cumulative, consistently responsible discipline of individual life history.
Psychoanalytic contributions may have been a necessary part of the development
of psychobiography, but they are not a sufficient base for its continued development.
An infusion of research-trained psychologists, skilled in diverse approaches to the study of human behavior, can remake and reinvigorate the field.
Imagine where psychobiography would be now if it had developed as a recognized
part of research psychology, starting seven or eight decades ago.
Imagine that in the mid-1920s a few eager young psychologists began to make psychobiography the center of their theoretical and methodological attention.
The field might still have detractors in our time—as any area of psychology does—but by now it would be a field that could comfortably tolerate such detractors.
In my alternate-world fantasy, I see dozens of experienced psychobiographers expertly plying their trade, while book reviewers bitterly criticize any biography that fails to ground its efforts in sound psychological thinking.
I see rows of library shelves weighed down with thoughtful research monographs that examine the psychological histories of every major creative artist, scientific theorist, and political leader of the past century.
In the next row over are shelves of critiques of these studies, adjacent to shelves of methodological handbooks designed to refine and strengthen the psychobiographies of the next century.
It could have happened that way. Perhaps it almost did.
In 1925, a brilliant young scientist named Henry Murray began to write a biography of Herman Melville.
This was Murray’s first effort at psychological analysis. Indeed, as he told me some 50 years later, it was the first professional research he had ever attempted, “outside of chemistry and embryology and things like that.”11
His scientific training had been in medicine and physiology; he became a psychologist on-the-job, first as Assistant Director and then as Director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic.
Off the job, he continued to explore the psychology of Melville.
After working on the biography for several years, Murray asked a newfound literary friend, Conrad Aiken, to look at the first hundred pages.
According to Murray, Aiken “spent a day over it and then he said, Oh, it was just terrible. … He said, ‘Start again, throw it away, no good, can’t do anything with it.'”12
Murray may have exaggerated Aiken’s negative response, but he took it to heart.
Though his interest in Melville remained, he left the manuscript largely untouched until the late 1930s.
When Murray showed Aiken a revised draft in 1939, Aiken’s response was even more devastating.
The book was never completed.13
Murray did eventually publish something on Melville.
But it was neither a fullscale psychobiography nor an incisive psychological journal article.
Instead it was a 90-page introduction to one of Melville’s least-read novels, Pierre, or, the Ambiguities.
14 His introduction to Pierre, together with an essay on Moby-Dick that appeared in a literary quarterly two years later,15 represented only a fraction of Murray’s thinking and writing about Melville across a quarter-century.
Nonetheless, the psychological insights contained in those two publications “transformed Melville scholarship,” according to a later scholar. ~Alan C. Elms, The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology, Page 3-6
