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Psychobiography aims to understand historically significant individuals, such as or , through the application of psychological theory and research.
Through its merging of personality psychology and historical evidence,B. J. Carducci, The Psychology of Personality (2009) p. 196 psychobiography may be considered a historical form of therapeutic case study: it represents a growing field in the realm of biography.C. Rollyson, Biography (2007) p. 3 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.
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.Murray, Henry. "The Analysis of The Personality of Adolph Hitler." The Analysis of The personality of Adolph Hitler (1943). N.p., n.d. Web
Major psychobiographical authors include Erik Erikson,Carducci, p. 197 James William Anderson, Henry Murray, George E. Atwood, and William Runyan.
Many psychobiographies are Psychoanalysis or Psychodynamics 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.Alan C. Elms, Uncovering Lives (1997) p. 9
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.Runyan, W., M. (1988). Progress in psychobiography. Journal of Personality, 56, 295-326. 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, George Sand, Goethe, Coleridge, Nietzsche, Poe, Rousseau, Caesar, Lincoln, Napoleon, Charles 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 Mill and John Stuart Mill (Bruce 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).Schultz, W., T. (2005). Handbook of psychobiography. New York, NY: Oxford University Press 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.
As psychobiography gained recognition, authors from a variety of professions contributed their own work from alternate perspectives and varying methods of analysis of the psychobiographical subjects, significantly expanding psychobiography beyond the psychoanalysis. Apart from psychoanalysts and Psychiatry who wrote the first psychobiographies, there have been historians, political scientists, personality psychologists, literary critics, sociology, and anthropology that have contributed to the growth of the field. Psychobiography has also conflicted with contemporary views of science since its origin because it contains no controlled variables or experimentation. In its early years it was dismissed as unscientific and not a legitimate addition to the field of psychology due to the push towards experimentation focused on physiological and biological factors, and away from philosophical psychology, to establish it as a natural science. The value of psychobiography to psychology is comparable to forensic science and archaeology, offering detailed analyses of subjects with an emphasis on contextual information, but due to the qualitative nature of this information it remains a challenge to validate psychobiographical works as empirically based applications of psychology.
Scholars untrained in the discipline who do not follow these guidelines continue to produce psychobiographical studies.
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.
Bad psychobiography—using mechanical psychologising, a selective mining of the facts,Barzun, p. 203 overdeterminism, and a tendency to pathologiseElms, p. 10-11—is considered easy to write. The haphazard historical evolution of the discipline has not helped reduce its prevalence.Elms, p. 8
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