Evolving Conceptions of Psychobiography and the Study of Lives: Encounters With Psychoanalysis, Personality Psychology, and Historical Science

Abstract This question is more complex than it first appears. How to conceptualize the study of lives? How do we conceptualize the discipline of psychology? And how are we to conceptualize their evolving relationships? Much is at stake in the answer, with implications for what psychology might become. People bet their careers and their working lives on different answers to such questions. This chapter attempts to tell a different story about psychobiography and the study of lives in relation to the discipline of psychology. It is not a traditional “rise of natural science “ story, in which case studies are seen as being replaced by more rigorous quantitative and experimental methods. It is, instead, a story which respects the virtues of historical, interpretive, and narrative methods, as well as of quantitative and experimental methods.