If the Glove Fits: The Art of Theoretical Choice in Psychobiography

Abstract 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. By the time they get around to writing a rough draft, my students have already been exposed, in class and in assigned reading, to a variety of short and long examples of psychobiography, and to several different theories of personality. But the relationships between these examples or theories and a student ‘s chosen subject may not be at all obvious. Indeed there may be little apparent connection between, let ‘s say, Erik Erikson ‘s analysis of Gandhi and the student ‘s typical term-paper choice of Madonna or Charles Manson.