Introducing Psychobiography

Abstract The aim of psychobiography is simply stated, though immensely difficult to achieve: the understanding of persons. This is what psycho-biographers spend their hours thinking and writing about: complex, creative, inevitably contradictory individual lives, many of them also at their end. If, to most research psycholo-gists—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 ahistory—should be job one. When I first started doing psychobiography under the guidance of Alan Elms at the University of California at Davis—indeed when I first heard the term even used—I quickly grasped its antidotal nature (it was a partial “cure “ for psychology ‘s “sicknesses “ of reductionism, scientism, trivialness, and irrelevance), and also its radicalism. It was not quite permissible. Its subjects weren ‘t anonymous. It had nothing to do with groups. It did not require statistics. It made little effort to discover general principles applicable either to everyone or to subsets of subjects.