Chapter One: "Introducing Psychobiography"
William Todd Schultz

The aim of psychobiography is simply stated, though immensely difficult to achieve: the understanding of persons. This is what psychobiographers spend their hours thinking and writing about: complex, creative, inevitably contradictory individual lives, many of them also at their end. If, to most research psychologists--those valuing above all else the examination of single variables and part-processes in contexts of careful experimental control--psychobiographers are felt to be chasing the wrong rainbows, that says more about psychology than it does psychobiography. After all, if psychology ought to strive for anything, if it hoped one sunny day to step away from its labs, one-way mirrors, instruments and apparatuses into the uncontrolled world of life, then saying something vital about people--not single-file nameless mobs, but actual individuals with a history--should be job one....

Chapter Two: "How to Strike Psychological Paydirt in Biographical Data"
William Todd Schultz

Choosing a subject to think and write about is the first step in any psychobiography. At some point a person, for an untold surplus of reasons partly conscious yet usually mostly unconscious, starts waving at you, calling out from a distance. Come see about me! Sometimes you stop to wonder why. Why this individual particularly? Or you wonder why later, after finishing your work, especially in cases when this individual seems to have a lot in common with other individuals who have waved and called in similar fashion before. Perhaps a certain type of person fascinates you uniquely, pulls on you in ways difficult to resist. Maybe the people you write about resemble you. Maybe you write about those you detest, with the aim (unconscious) of justifying your enmity. Maybe you write about people you admire, in possession of talents you wish you possessed. Whatever the case, this "why" question is worth mulling over. It may even constitute a place to start, or at least somewhere to sojourn as the process of research unfolds. As I discuss later in my chapter on Diane Arbus (see Schultz, this Handbook), it sometimes happens that the "why" factor interferes with "whats" and other "whys." Our own needs can get in the way, that is, leaving us dangerously cock-eyed. So be watchful. The doing of psychobiography occasionally careens into autobiography. And when that happens, as it did to Freud in his work on Leonardo, even the most elegantly assembled edifice goes up in smoke. Elms' (1994) advice works well as a general principle: best to select a subject for whom your feelings are neither strongly negative nor strongly positive. It's not possible to feel nothing. You won't sustain any interest at all lacking some intensity of affect. The proscription is against letting that affect run away with you. Use it but don't abuse it, or better yet, don't let it abuse you....

Chapter Three: "What Psychobiographers Might Learn From Personality Psychology"
Dan P. McAdams

Personality psychology is the scientific study of the whole person. The ultimate goal of personality psychology is to provide a valid account of an individual person’s life (Allport, 1937; McAdams, 2001a). In a similar vein, psychobiographers aim to provide psychological accounts of individual human lives, especially the lives of famous or controversial persons. In applying psychological concepts to the particular life, psychobiographers often put into practice ideas that are of central concern to personality psychology (Runyan, 1990). You might think, therefore, that psychobiography and personality psychology would have much in common. You might expect that personality psychologists would find many illuminating case examples in the literature of psychobiography and that psychobiographers might draw upon contemporary personality theory and research to inform their explorations of the individual human life. You might even envision a lively and critical dialogue between the “fields” of personality psychology and psychobiography. But if you thought, expected, or imagined any of this, you would be wrong....

Chapter Four: "If the Glove Fits: Choosing a Theory in Psychobiography"
Alan C. Elms

For the past twenty years, I’ve regularly taught an undergraduate course on psychobiography. Students in this course must write a brief but original psychobiographical term paper on a subject of their choice. Most students quickly choose a subject who meets the assignment’s basic requirements: he or she must be publicly known for some kind of achievement (political, scientific, artistic, criminal, or whatever), and the student must be able to obtain a substantial amount of biographical information. But then, because this is to be a psychobiographical paper and not merely a biographical sketch, each student faces the problem of which psychological concepts, or what psychological theory, to apply....

Chapter Five: "How to Critically Evaluate Alternative Explanations of Life Events: The Case of Van Gogh"
William M. Runyan

Late Sunday evening December 23, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh, then 35 years old, cut off the lower half of his left ear and took it to a brothel, where he asked for a prostitute named Rachel and handed the ear to her, asking her to "keep this object carefully." How is this extraordinary event to be accounted for? Over the years, a variety of explanations have been proposed, and more than a dozen of them will be sketched below. What sense can be made of such a variety of interpretations? Is one of them uniquely true, are all of them true in some way, or, perhaps, are none of them true? And how can we know? This incident is examined in order to explore the problem of alternative explanations in the study of lives....

Chapter Six: "Multiple Case Psychobiography: Theory and Method"
Kate Isaacson

Since the inception of psychobiography as a method for studying lives (Freud, 1910), the field has primarily focused on in-depth empirical analyses of the single case. Over the course of the last century, analytical approaches and methods have grown more complex, taking into account an ever-increasing set of variables, including context, the environment, and close relationships. The field has begun to move away from analysis of the single case exclusively, and is now, with more frequency than ever before, taking a long hard look at both interactions between people and comparisons among small groups of people....

Chapter Seven: "Diane Arbus' Photographic Autobiography: Theory and Method Applied"
William Todd Schultz

This chapter is an ambitious one for the reason that I want to try doing two things simultaneously--without, I hope, short-changing either aim. My focus is the life and art of photographer Diane Arbus, best known for her pictures of "freaks"--a fact that would displease her--and for her suicide in 1971, in the wake of a series of decidedly eerie photographs taken at homes for the mentally retarded, many of these on Halloween. I want to use her case as a way of illustrating the doing of psychobiography from the ground up, from inception to conception to completion (not that any psychobiography ever reaches closure). What is typically subtextual will be made explicit here, the intention being to share process-related, tactical decisions regarding, among other things, where to begin in the study of a life, how to prioritize biographical data, and choice of theory. At the same time I present interpretations of Arbus' life and work that came to light in the course of a psychobiography seminar I taught in spring of 2002. What emerges is a hybrid enterprise: part method primer, largely generalizable to other analyses of artists (though photography is in many respects unique as an art form), and part speculative interpretation geared at unearthing the subjective origins of a deeply mysterious and maybe even unusually personal body of artistic work....

SECTION TWO: Psychobiography of Artists

Chapter Eight: "The Psychobiographical Study of Artists"
William Todd Schultz

Attitudes towards psychobiographies of artists tend to fall into two general camps: some see nothing wrong with such a practice, others see everything wrong with such a practice. My sentiments lie with the former position, but I've thought a lot about the reasoning behind the latter, having been faced with it a few times in the course of my researches. Those who reject psychobiographies of artists by definition seem concerned, first and foremost, with issues of framing. That is, they feel too much information about the deeper motives of the artist, or even the artist's biography, interferes with perception of the art. Not only is such information unnecessary, they say, it also sullies the art itself, detracting from intrinsic qualities felt to be of higher purity. In short, art must stand on its own. All one needs to do is look at it. Everything about the artist is there to begin with, in the photograph or painting or poem. To add is to subtract....

Chapter Nine: "Twelve Ways to Say 'Lonesome': Assessing Error and Control in the Music of Elvis Presley"
Alan C. Elms & Bruce Heller

In the current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (2002), twenty-two usage citations include the name of Elvis Presley. The two earliest citations, from 1956, show the terms rock and roll and rockin’ in context. A more recent citation, from a 1981 issue of the British magazine The Listener, demonstrates the usage of the word docudrama: “In the excellent docudrama film, This Is Elvis, there is a painful sequence . . . where Elvis . . . attempts to sing ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’” (The ellipses are the OED’s.)

This Is Elvis warrants the term “docudrama” because it uses professional actors to re-enact scenes from Elvis’s childhood and pre-fame youth. But most of the film is straight documentary. The “painful sequence” cited by The Listener and the OED is an actual concert performance, occurring late in the film and in Elvis’s life. It remains painful to watch: Elvis, his face puffy and wet with sweat or tears or both, his elaborate jumpsuit bulging at the seams, struggles with one of his most popular songs. He repeatedly forgets words and whole lines of the lyrics, replacing them with crudely self-abnegating jokes.

That particular performance occasioned widespread comment, not only during the film’s theatrical release in 1981 but in later biographical works on Elvis. As one example of film commentary, the noted critic Pauline Kael wrote (after expressing admiration for the young Elvis’s performances):

By the end of the picture, in 1977, the heavyset, forty-two-year-old celebrity-god Elvis Presley is a gulping, slurring crooner, faltering on the lyrics of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” . . . [H]e sweats so much that his face seems to be melting away. . . . [T]he dissolving face . . . recalls De Palma’s pop-culture horror movie Phantom of the Paradise. [1984, p. 201] As an example of biography, Albert Goldman concluded his scurrilous best-seller Elvis with a description of the same scene: He is smiling but sweating so profusely that his face appears to be bathed in tears. Going up on a line in one of those talking bridges he always had trouble negotiating, he comes down in a kooky, free-associative monologue that summons up the image of the dope-crazed Lenny Bruce. . . . For thirty or forty seconds of mental free-fall, you are up in that padded cell atop Graceland watching Elvis blither with tightly shut eyes as he voices all the crazy ideas that come thronging into his dope-sprung mind. [1981, p. 591]

Other critics and biographers have similarly asserted or implied that Elvis’s difficulties with the song during this performance came from his heavy drug use, and perhaps more generally from his deteriorating brain as he neared death, less than two months away.

Closer study of this performance, however, suggests that Elvis’s forgetting and replacing of the song’s lyrics were not merely a matter of random drug-induced memory loss, but were in large part psychologically motivated. Set within the context of his previous performances of the same song and related songs, his final recorded performance of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” provides evidence that issues central to his earlier psychological development remained significant until the end of his life....

Chapter Ten: "Mourning, Melancholia, and Sylvia Plath"
William Todd Schultz

Writing an essay on Sylvia Plath is a lot like taking up the subject of Marilyn or Hitler. One has the feeling of arriving late or, worse, uninvited to a party packed with people, all nursing finely-wrought opinions of one sort or another for which they might even be willing to die. There is, one quickly senses, an enormous amount of catching up to do. What's left to say that can be the least bit unexpected, the slightest bit revisive? And when one combs the margins, and as the margins grow ever more marginal, so too do most ideas residing there. In fact, the more limited the aim, the more precise the question asked, the more jejune it proportionally becomes. Slim chance for a large statement, in other words.

Plus, there is so much to canvas--multiplying mountains of opinion, some worth thinking about, some not at all. Even a partial list of required reading includes the first journals with their elliptical taint (editorial excisions); the newly released, unabridged journals (excisions restored); Plath's "letters home" to her mother (more ellipses); the poems, of course; the stories; the one novel The Bell Jar; Ted Hughes' occasional reluctant weighings-in, along with his last book of poems, The Birthday Letters; the blizzard of memoirs and reminiscences written by intimates and mere acquaintances alike, some who scarcely knew Plath; and the numberless biographies, each with its own barely concealed agenda. Maybe the best book of all is Janet Malcolm's (1995) masterful and delightfully debunking The Silent Woman, a sort of un-biography on the perils of biography that somehow says more about Plath than the various lives themselves put together....

Chapter Eleven: "Margaret's Smile"
Dan Ogilvie

A few guidelines usually govern my activities when I conduct case study research: (a) permit the person who is the object of my investigation to take the lead as far as he or she is able to go, (b) suspend any notions regarding how the study will work out, (c) be open to surprises, (d) use the problems that arise as opportunities to learn about and welcome developments in surrounding disciplines, and (e) estimate how much time it will take to complete the project, triple it, and be prepared to triple it again.

I didn't think I would need to consult my guidelines when I embarked on a study of James M. Barrie. I intended it to be a simple study with a specific focus on the possible Oedipal origins of Barrie's famous story about Peter Pan. My original purpose went no further than to locate and organize some new material for a lecture in a course I have taught for many years on the topic of personality psychology. In the context of a field deeply rooted in the tradition of psychometric science wherein variables instead of people are the preferred units of analysis, I felt it would do no harm to expose my students to "old" ways of thinking about personality development, even if only as an interlude or break between lectures on scale construction and research designs....

Chapter Twelve: "Edith Wharton and Ethan Frome: A Psychobiographical Exploration"
James Anderson

The novelist Edith Wharton published an autobiography that never gets beneath the surface. But she also left behind some unpublished pages that are far more revealing. These begin:

My first conscious recollection is of being kissed in Fifth Avenue by my cousin Dan Fearing.

It was a winter day, I was walking with my father, & I was a little less than four years old, when this momentous event took place. My cousin, a very round and rosy little boy, two or three years older, was also walking with his father; & I remember distinctly his running up to me, & kissing me, & the extremely pleasant sensation which his salute produced. With equal distinctness, I recall the satisfaction I felt in knowing that I had on my best bonnet….Thus I may truly say that my first conscious sensations were produced by the two deepest-seated instincts of my nature—the desire to love & to look pretty. (Wharton, 1990, p. 1071)

I would add that the experience includes intimacy with a male, not only her little cousin but her father, whom she had to herself on that wintry day. Her nascent sexuality is suggested; the kiss aroused an “extremely pleasant sensation.”

SECTION THREE: Psychobiography of Psychologists

Chapter Thirteen: "The Psychobiographical Study of Psychologists"
James Anderson

Perceptive observers have long noticed that there is an intimate connection between the personal life of psychologists—their experiences, troubles, preoccupations, and conflicts—and the psychological ideas and theories they create. Often this connection is spoken of as surprising or humorous. Henry A. Murray (1975), himself an influential psychological theorist, was talking with me once about Erik Erikson, whom he had known for many years. He pointed out that Erikson’s theory of human development did not fit everyone but applied to Erikson and people like him very well. Then he chuckled and, referring to theories of human development in general, he said, “They’re all autobiographies, every one of them.”

I work in Chicago, the same city where Heinz Kohut, the preeminent theorist of narcissism, lived. I frequently heard stories about his narcissism (along with recollections of his brilliance, I should add). He loved it when he was honored on the occasion of his 60th birthday; he read his new writings to his inner circle but did not want to hear any criticisms; as a young man he slept with a hairnet to preserve his pompadour. Everyone said, “Well, of course he wrote about narcissism.”

Chapter Fourteen: "Freud as Leonardo: Why the First Psychobiography Went Wrong"
Alan C. Elms

Sigmund Freud's book on Leonardo (1910/1957b) is widely regarded as the first genuine psychobiography. Other researchers, including Mˆbius and Sadger, had previously concerned themselves with the psychology of "great men," but their main goal was to arrive at a specific diagnosis of psychopathology. In Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, Freud went much further: He applied a systematic theory of personality to the entire span of a creative individual's life, and he provided psychological explanations for certain of Leonardo's achievements as well as his failures....

Chapter Fifteen: "Four, Two, or One? Gordon Allport and the Unique Personality"
Nicole Barenbaum

A recurrent theme in the work of personality psychologist Gordon Allport (1897-1967) is the opposition between the general and the unique in psychology (e.g., Allport, 1962a). In a characteristic statement of this theme, Allport described in neutral terms two tendencies in human thought: “The mind may classify its experience and contemplate the general principles that emerge, or it may be concerned with the individual happening or single event confronting it” (1942, p. 53). To illustrate these tendencies, however, he quoted from William James, choosing a passage that was far from neutral:

The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. “I am no such thing,” it would say; “I am myself, myself alone.” (James, 1902, p. 10, quoted in Allport, 1942, p. 53)

Allport’s choice of this passage, which shifts rapidly from a description of our reluctance as classifiers to a vivid portrayal of the outrage experienced by the object (or the crab!) we have classified, suggests the emotional intensity of his own concern with the unique self. Indeed, Allport is known as a champion of the individual personality and as an advocate of the study of individual lives (Barenbaum, 1997, 1998). As his biographer Ian Nicholson (2003) has shown, Allport’s interest in personality reflected pervasive concerns regarding the problem of individuality not only in psychology (see, e.g., Stern, 1900), but also in American culture during the Progressive Era. Allport was especially insistent on the uniqueness of personality, making it a central tenet of his theory (Elms, 1994; Nicholson, 1998)....

Chapter Sixteen: "Nietzsche's Madness"
Kyle Arnold & George Atwood

At first glance, a psychobiographical study of Nietzsche might appear inherently naÔve. After all, weren’t Nietzsche's writings partly responsible for what literary theorists call the "death of the author," the current tendency of many scholars to dismiss any connection between an author’s subjectivity and his or her work? Doesn’t this imply that Nietzsche’s work also announced the “death” of psychobiography? (Sarup, 1993)

Perhaps. Yet as we so often find when examining Nietzsche's texts, these strands of thought are interwoven with their polar opposites. Nietzsche's apparent flight from the notion of all-determining authorship is coupled with a desire to reconnect text with author, to use the lived experience of authors in rescuing their texts from what he saw as the thin, unbreathable air of impersonal and bloodless intellectuality. Philosophical ideas, for instance, are envisaged as "hav[ing] always lived on the 'blood' of the philosopher, they always consumed his senses and even, if you will believe us, his 'heart.'" They are, Nietzsche says, "a kind of long concealed vampire in the background who begins with the senses and in the end is left with, and leaves, mere bones, mere clatter…" (GS p333)

Chapter Seventeen: "Erikson and Psychobiography, Psychobiography and Erikson"
Irving Alexander

In recent years two publications have appeared that have revived public interest in the life and work of Erik Erikson (1902-1994). One certainly is Lawrence J. Friedman’s Identity’s Architect (1999), an outstanding biography of Erikson’s life and work. Friedman, a historian, spent ten years producing this volume. He contacted many of the most important people in Erikson’s life, including his wife Joan, who helped in providing data about more than sixty years of their life together. His use of archival sources both here and abroad was extensive and his knowledge of Erikson’s work and the history of psychoanalysis impressive. The major events of Erikson’s life are clearly drawn and well documented, making the book a treasure trove for the psychobiographer....

Chapter Eighteen: "From the Book of Mormon to the Operational Definition: The Existential Project of S.S. Stevens"
Ian Nicholson

In 1935, Harvard psychologist S.S. Stevens published a landmark paper in the history of American psychology. Entitled “The Operational Definition of Psychological Concepts,” the paper laid out a philosophical formula for transforming psychology into a truly empirical science and it introduced psychologists to a now ubiquitous term: the “operational definition” (Stevens, 1935a). Stevens' basic idea was to eliminate ambiguity by tying linguistic statements of psychological phenomena to observables. “Operational doctrine,” Stevens wrote, “makes explicit recognition of the fact that a concept, or proposition, has empirical meaning only if it stands for definite, concrete operations capable of execution by normal human beings” (1935a, p. 517). By rigorously policing the relationship between what we see, and the linguistic terms that we use to describe our observations, Stevens believed that psychologists could be “rid of the hazy ambiguities which result in ceaseless argument and dissension” (1935a, p. 517).

SECTION FOUR: Psychobiography of Political Figures

Chapter Nineteen: "Alive and Kicking: The Problematics of Political Psychobiography"
Alan C. Elms & Anna V. Song

The subjects studied by political psychobiographers are in many ways similar to other psychobiographical subjects. Political figures move through a lifetime of psychological development, engage in social interactions, reach and carry out decisions, make public statements, leave private records. In all those regards the study of their lives presents the same challenges, and offers the same opportunities for psychological analysis, as the study of philosophers or creative artists or scientific theorists. But a major subset of subjects within political psychobiography is distinctive in one important way: They are alive and kicking. They are not only not dead (in dramatic contrast to the subjects of most psychobiographies); they are busily pursuing their political careers. They are current candidates for office, or occupants of elective or appointive office, or self-appointed leaders of nations and mass movements. However they got to where they are, their active political involvement presents their would-be psychobiographers with problems seldom encountered in other parts of the field....

Chapter Twenty: "Osama Bin Laden: The Sum of All Fears"
Anthony Dennis

Few, if anyone, would seriously dispute the impact Osama Bin Laden has had on world events starting on September 11, 2001. Whether one considers him a terrorist, a megalomaniac and a mass murderer, or a populist hero and one of the most holy and devout followers of Islam alive today, Osama Bin Laden has left an indelible mark on human history that undoubtedly will be debated, analyzed and discussed for decades and even centuries to come....

Chapter Twenty-One: "In His Father's Shadow: George W. Bush and the Politics of Slow Personal Transformation"
Stanley Renshon

In order to understand who George W. Bush is, one must first understand who he was. His story, like the man himself, is not particularly complicated, at least in broad outline. He was born into an accomplished and wealthy family, then took some time to find his way. Substantial evidence indicates that the most important ingredients of adult development were consolidated only very gradually by Mr. Bush. Such a fact warrants neither alarm nor sneers. After all, some never arrive at a successful adult personality structure.

How did Mr. Bush's life begin? With great promise, many assets, and colossal advantages. But with these benefits came demands. The complexities he faced, and the talents he brought to bear--and developed--as he faced these demands, is the focus of this chapter. Special emphasis is also placed on Mr. Bush's relationships with his father and mother; the challenges of being born into such a spectacularly successful family; his battles with alcohol addiction; and his ownership role in the Texas Rangers baseball team. All such experiences propelled Mr. Bush into what can only be described as a profound psychological impasse. His life history, combined with his private ambition, pushed towards success. Yet every time he sought to gain a foothold, he found little solid ground....

Chapter Twenty-Two: "Kim Jong Il 2"
Anna V. Song

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, or as he has titled himself, “Dear Leader,” presents an interesting puzzle to outside observers. As his people starve to death, he entertains Russian dignitaries with opulent train rides full of helicopter-delivered lobsters, cognac, and women. While many parents are forced to leave their children at orphanages lest they die of exposure, Kim showered his children with toys and electronics—even his illegitimate son was given a 1,000 square foot room filled with toys and slot machines. As the technological and economic gap between North Korea and the world widens, Kim is funneling all incoming resources to his military and his newly regenerated nuclear program. It is not as if Kim is oblivious to the state of his country. On the contrary, he has used his nation’s desperate situation as a leveraging tool for more humanitarian aid from the international community. Yet how could a rational human being ignore such despair and indulge in luxury in front of the world stage?

Chapter Twenty-Three: "Psychobiography in Context: Predicting the Behavior of Tyrants"
Betty Glad

Psychobiography can help solve political puzzles, so long as political behavior is not seen reductively as a simple re-enactment of childhood adaptations. As Schultz points out in Chapter One (this Handbook), excessive reductionism signifies bad psychobiography. Behavior, after all, is modulated by context, and the political leader with great power is in a very special position -- able, perhaps, to change the environment in which he and others operate. It is this interaction -- particularly relevant in the case of a tyrant-- that is the focus of this study. I look at how certain leaders affect their environment and how their behavior is in turn influenced by what they create....