William Todd Schultz, PhD

Psychobiography is the name given to life histories making substantial use of psychological theory and/or research as a means of shedding light on the interior lives of biographical subjects, and the connection between the life and the work. Intrinsically interdisciplinary, psychobiography assumes a variety of shapes and forms, its allegiances indeterminate. It isn't exactly psychology, at least as psychology is conventionally defined, because its unit of analysis is the single case, the single life -- even what statisticians call the "outlier" -- not pooled responses elicited from participants in carefully controlled experimental situations. It isn't quite biography, either. Its aims tend to be more modest. Instead of telling the story of an entire life, of tracing that life's wending trajectory, its dead-ends and detours, it usually confines itself to salient episodes or fragments abstracted from the life as a whole. And it isn't quite literary criticism -- though its subjects are sometimes literary -- because it is explicitly, determinedly psychological. It works to make both literary and psychological sense of its subjects. In fact, it makes literary sense by making psychological sense. What strikes one most about psychobiography is its inextricable in-between-ness, its hybridity. It seems, for that reason and others, peculiarly postmodern. But it isn't. The urge to psychobiographize has been with us forever.

Bringing psychological insights to bear on lives began with the Greeks, with Plutarch, Xenophon, and Thucidydes. The Gospels, too, and tales of the Buddha, are less biographies than psychological portraits of a spectacularly compelling personality lovingly revealed. Closer to today, psychologically-rooted life writing can be traced to Freud, who for what Alan Elms (1994) sees as deeply personal reasons seized on Leonardo as a sort of test case for aspects of psychoanalytic theory. Because of its insistently psychological purposes, this one work -- Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood(1964) -- deserves special emphasis. It is psychobiography at its best and worst. For Freud, Leonardo represents a perfect and rare type of artist, one who from early infancy succeeded in channeling sexual instinct into artistic and scientific investigation. Apparently sexless, Leonardo's work was his erotic life, liberated through "sublimation" from the demands of sexuality. His paintings recapitulate the lost mother, Freud claims, the uncanny Mona Lisa smile signifying an irrecoverable absence. We see here Freud's method revealed: the psychological functions as one way, maybe the preeminent way, of approaching an aesthetic understanding. But Freud goes disastrously wrong. Against his own stated proscriptions -- one being never to build hypotheses based on a single clue -- Freud focuses in on an early memory and from it reconstructs a missing childhood history. In his journals Leonardo records a dream of a bird visiting him in his cradle and thrusting its tail into his mouth. Freud relies on an inaccurate translation of the passage depicting the bird as a vulture (in fact, the bird was a kite). This error leads Freud to offer a set of suppositions based on the mythological significance of the vulture which, with the correct translation restored, must be invalid. Consequently, Freud's psychological analysis of Leonardo loses much, but not all, of its usefulness.

Even so, Freud's work sets an excellent standard. It tells us both what to do, and what not to do. Among other things, according to Freud psychological life historians ought to 1) avoid pathographizing and idealizing the biographical subject, 2) steer clear of drawing strong conclusions from inadequate data, 3) examine the internal and external validity of biographical anecdotes, 4) compare the biographical subject's behavior with that of contemporaries, and, as mentioned already, 5) resist spinning webs of meaning out of isolated, unrepeated events or psychological circumstances. Freud didn't always hew to these guidelines as closely as he should have, but by making them explicit he at least pointed the way towards a sensible methodology for psychological life writing (for an analysis of why Freud violated so many of his own proscriptions, and a stellar example of psychobiography at its very best, see Elms, 1994).

Apart from Freud's work, other defining twentieth-century contributions to psychological life writing include Erikson's Gandhi's Truth (1969) and Young Man Luther (1958), Gordon Allport's Letters From Jenny (1965; it was Allport who famously asked, "How shall a life history be written?"), Henry Murray's Endeavors in Psychology (1981, edited by Edwin Shneidman), Dan McAdams' The Stories We Live By (1993), and Jerome Bruner's Acts of Meaning (1990).

Partly because some have tended to snicker at any intrusion of the psychological into biography and to treat all psychological biographies as somehow intrinsically distasteful or disrespectful and therefore invalid tout court, much recent work devotes itself to the same sorts of concerns that preoccupied Freud. What makes for a good psychobiographical explanation? Are all psychological interpretations of lives essentially equal, or are some clearly better than others? Asserting the former position is tantamount to adopting an "anything goes" mentality and injudiciously throws all critical thinking, not to mention common sense, out the window. Not without reason, then, most psychobiographers prefer the latter alternative. William Runyan is one case in point. His immensely influential essay, "Why Did van Gogh Cut Off His Ear?" (see Runyan, 1982), spells out in crisp detail the hallmarks of a promising psychobiographical explanation. Such explanations are logically sound, comprehensive, consistent with the full range of available evidence, credible relative to other hypotheses, resistant to attempted falsifications, and in accordance with more general psychological knowledge about human mental life or about the person in question. One might add that the good psychobiography makes the previously incoherent in a life, coherent. It goes beyond merely coincidental connections between life and work by illuminating gestalts, repetitions of theme or subject, persistent modes of defense, formal symmetries, preferred narrative structures or tropes, constellating metaphors. It is a meaning-making enterprise which, by subjecting a life to what is known about people generally, uncovers hidden or partially obscured psychological structures. All epistemology aside, we know a good psychological life history when we see one. It clears up enigmas, and feels like the solution to a riddle. In a word, it persuades, chiefly by meeting the criteria Runyan outlines.

For more works on psychobiographical methodology specifically, Irv Alexander's Personology: Method and Content in Personality Assessment and Psychobiography (1990), and Alan Elms' Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (1994) deserve special emphasis, in addition to Runyan's.

At this turn of the century psychological life writing has tended to make use of emerging narrative models of self as one additional way of examining lives. In this regard, the work of Dan McAdams, Silvan Tomkins, Rae Carlson, Ted Sarbin, and Jerome Bruner stands out. If we are what we remember having said or done, and if personality is, maybe more than anything else, a story we tell ourselves and others, a scripted fiction in which we appear as one among a larger cast of characters, also invented, then life writing may proceed by identifying the structure of a biographical subject's "narrative": the stories he tells, the scenes he constructs, the characters or "imagos" he employs, and the metaphors in which he cloaks himself. To the degree that personality is artful self-invention, psychobiography functions best when it sets its sights on the self's artistry, treating its subject as the author of an identity he or she continually revises or even rewrites on occasion. In this framework, identity is not so much a structure, an entity, something handed to us through a combination of circumstance and genetic inheritance as it is a construction, an imaginative re-ordering which we compose and plot out with whatever degree of artfulness that seems appropriate or necessary.

Psychology's increasing presence in biography has led many to wonder whether some sort of psychological orientation is necessary to the practice of life writing. Maybe not necessary, but certainly beneficial. How so? Most life writers rely on implicit theories of personality when estimating the psychology of their subjects. On occasions when they do appear, psychological conclusions seem to land on the page as if by magic, their sources in theory or research obscured, or at least underexamined. A more explicit and deliberate introduction of psychology into life writing would leave assumptions open to scrutiny, bring them into the light of day, allowing for a better opportunity to assess their efficacy or suitability. Plus, informed use of the psychological often makes for a more satisfying, more rounded life history. Readers increasingly want to know (for assorted complex reasons) what drives a person, what her "hidden" motives are, why she does the things she does. The expect it, in fact. Psychology, when used thoughtfully, shows the way into murkier regions of the self.

If psychology improves life writing, does biography similarly improve psychology? More and more psychologists seem to think so. As Alan Elms so felicitously put it, "Lives are not lived in the laboratory. In the real world, personalities are not divided into statistically analyzable components. Experiments and correlational studies, and statistical analyses of the data they generate, may identify significant variables in the lives of people-in-general. But I haven't encountered a psychologist yet who could put together a whole person from those statistical body-parts and honestly cry out, 'It's Alive!'" (1994, 12[-]13). In other words, life history restores the individual to psychology. It brings psychologists abruptly face-to-face with the sometimes vexing subtleties of the complex case in all its richness and particularity, telling us what we don't know, and what we ought to commit ourselves to looking into more fully. It is, in this sense, antidotal. If all the "laws" derived from mainstream research move us further and further away from the lonely single life, burying it in generalities, then psychobiography works like a kind of exhumation, reminding us of the importance of this life here, and that one over there. The case study might be psychology's "return of the repressed."

What psychological life writing brings to life history research more generally conceived is, first and foremost, a method with which to encounter the biographical subject. What, in the clotted, bedevilling mass of life history material, deserves special emphasis? How do we link up life events with creative achievements? When is a psychological attitude called for, and when is it ill-advised or prematurely invoked? A sound understanding of psychobiography and psychobiographical method generates answers to all such questions. Moreover, to many the knowledgeable, clear-headed, circumspect use of psychological theory in life history analysis makes for a deeper, fuller, ultimately more satisfying biographical picture. If the urge to psychobiographize in biography really is difficult to suppress, or if its suppression results in a relatively jejune life study, then let the urge express itself--but advisedly, wisely, with the best it has at its disposal.