Psychobiography aims to understand historically significant individuals, such as artists or political leaders, through the application of psychological theory and research.

Through its merging of personality psychology and historical evidence, psychobiography may be considered a historical form of therapeutic case study: it represents a growing field in the realm of biography. Psychopathography is sometimes used as a term to indicate that the person being analyzed was not mentally healthy, "path" coming from pathos (πάθος)—Ancient Greek for suffering or illness.

Background

Psychobiography is a field within the realms of psychology and biography that analyzes the lives of historically significant individuals through psychological theory and research. Its goal is to develop a better understanding of notable individuals by applying psychological theories to their biographies to further explain the motives behind some of the subjects actions and decisions. Popular subjects of psychobiographies include figures such as Adolf Hitler, Vincent van Gogh, William Shakespeare, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and Saddam Hussein. A typical biography is often very descriptive, and tries to record every notable event that happened in a person's lifetime, whereas a psychobiography primarily focuses on some particular events, and tries to better understand why they happened. This field's potential has not only aided in developing a better understanding to many notable biographies throughout history, but has also inspired direction and insight into the field of psychology.

One of the first great examples of this field's utility was Dr. Henry Murray's report on the analysis of Adolf Hitler's personality during the end of World War II. Forced to psychoanalyze from a distance, Dr. Murray used multiple sources, including Hitler's genealogy, Hitler's own writings, and biographies of Hitler, so that the Allied forces could understand his personality to better predict his behavior. By applying a theory of personality that consisted of 20 psychogenic needs, Dr. Murray presumed Hitler's personality as "counteractive narcism", and was able to correctly predict the German leader's suicide in the face of his country's defeat. This work by Dr. Murray not only helped establish personality psychology as a behavioral science, but it also showed how the field of psychobiography could be applied as a means of psychoanalysis.

Origins and development

Persons who have been the subject of psychobiographical research include Freud, Adolf Hitler, Sylvia Plath, Carl Jung, Vincent van Gogh, Martin Luther, Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Andrew Jackson, Richard Nixon, and Ignatius of Loyola.

Major psychobiographical authors include Erik Erikson, James William Anderson, Henry Murray, George E. Atwood, and William Runyan.

Many psychobiographies are Freudian or psychodynamic in orientation, but other commonly used theories include narrative models of identity such as the life story model, script theory, object relations, and existentialism/phenomenology; and psychobiographers are increasingly looking for explanatory complexity through an eclectic approach.

Though there were other psychobiographies written before Freud's Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood in 1910, it is considered the most significant contribution of its time, despite its flaws. Psychobiographies about William Shakespeare (Jones, 1910), Giovanni Segantini (Abraham, 1912), Richard Wagner (Graf, 1911), Amenhotep IV (Abraham, 1912), Martin Luther (Smith, 1913), and Socrates (Karpas, 1915) were also published between 1910 and 1915, but are not as well known. Between 1920 and 1926, psychobiographies of Margaret Fuller (Anthony, 1920), Samuel Adams (Harlow, 1923), Edgar Allan Poe (Krutch, 1926), and Abraham Lincoln (Clark, 1923) were published by authors from a psychoanalytic perspective without a background in psychoanalysis. During the 1930s Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Molière, Sand, Goethe, Coleridge, Nietzsche, Poe, Rousseau, Caesar, Lincoln, Napoleon, Darwin, and Alexander the Great were the subjects of psychobiographies, and soon afterward in 1943 a psychobiography of Adolf Hitler, predicting his suicide, was written during World War II, but was not published until 1972. Recent, significant contributions between 1960 and 1990 include psychobiographies of Henry James (Edel, 1953–72), Isaac Newton (Manuel, 1968), Mohandas Gandhi (Erikson, 1969), Max Weber (Mitzman, 1969), Emily Dickinson (Cody, 1971), Joseph Stalin (Tucker, 1973), James and John Stuart Mill (Mazlish, 1975), T. E. Lawrence (Mack, 1976), Adolf Hitler (Waite, 1977), Beethoven (Solomon, 1977), Samuel Johnson (Bate, 1977), Alice James (Strouse, 1980), Wilhelm Reich (Sharaf, 1983), and William James (Feinstein, 1984). Some psychobiographies at this time were also written about groups of people, focusing on an aspect they had in common such as American presidents, philosophers, utopians, revolutionary leaders, and personality theorists. These psychobiographies are the most well known, but since 1910 there have been over 4000 psychobiographies published.

  1. The use of a series of indicators of salience, markers such as primacy, frequency, and uniqueness of an event in a life, to identify significant patterns

Elms

Elms has contributed to psychobiography through many published works including psychobiographies on Allport (1972), Freud (1980), Skinner (1981), and Murray (1987). He has also written about the subject of psychobiography in Psychobiography and Case Study Methods and Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology defining psychobiography and its methods, and explaining the value of psychobiography in psychology.

Mayer

Claude-Hélène Mayer is a psychobiographer whose research combines psychology, management, and cultural anthropology. Her work examines psychobiography from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Mayer applies complex psychological theories, such as Jungian analysis, existential psychology, and intercultural psychology, to the lives of prominent individuals. Her work often explores the interplay of culture, identity, and meaning-making, providing nuanced portraits that go beyond surface-level biography. She further investigates subjects from diverse cultural backgrounds and emphasizes the role of sociocultural context in psychological development. This positions her work at the intersection of psychobiography and intercultural psychology, a space few have explored with such rigor. She has contributed to bring psychobiography and the non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) approach closer together and her work is known for its depth and scholarly precision. Finally, she has contributed to expand the psychobiographical research methodology, highlighting the importance to use interdisciplinary theories, positive psychology and existential psychology as tools in the psychobiographical analysis. She is further a pioneer in emphasising the importance of "Lessons learned" from psychobiography.

Criticism

Psychobiography has faced criticism from the very start, crystallised above all in the production of what Erikson caricatured as "originology"—the explaining away of significant public events and actions as the product of some minute childhood detail.

Bad psychobiography—using mechanical psychologising, a selective mining of the facts, overdeterminism, and a tendency to pathologise—is considered easy to write. The haphazard historical evolution of the discipline has not helped reduce its prevalence.

See also

  • Psychopathography of Adolf Hitler
  • Retrospective diagnosis
  • Leadership Analysis

References

Further reading

  • Krasovska, N. & Mayer, C.-H. (2021). A psychobiography of Viktor E. Frankl. Using adversity for life transformation. Springer Briefs in Psychology. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Briefs.
  • Mayer, C.-H.; van Niekerk, R., Fouché, P.J. & Ponterotto, J. (2023). Beyond WEIRD: Psychobiography in Times of Transcultural and Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
  • Mayer, C.-H., Fouché, P.J., & van Niekerk, R. (2021). Psychobiographical illustrations on meaning and identity in sociocultural contexts. Sociocultural Psychology of the Lifecourse Series. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillian. Mayer, C.-H. (2017). The life and creative works of Paulo Coelho. A Psychobiography from a Positive Psychology Perspective. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
  • Mayer, C.-H. & Kovary, Z. (2019). New Trends in Psychobiography. Cham, Switzerland: Springer
  • Ogilvie, Dan (2004). Fantasies of Flight. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Runyan, William (1982). Life Histories and Psychobiography. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Schultz, William Todd (2005). Handbook of Psychobiography. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Psychobiography Forum, https://psychobiographyforum.com/
  • What is Psychobiography?
  • Analysis of the Personality of Hitler