Search Results

This chapter focuses on Henry Murray's approach to laboratory studies of individual lives. The goal was to condense the story of a person's life into another story, a psychological narrative that dealt with a person's inner reality, which can be referred to as psychobiography. Secure in his knowledge of science and its limitations, Murray was forthright about there being a component of artistry involved in writing psychological narratives. He insisted, however, that narratives be written as part of a joint venture with input from a team of researchers that constituted what became known as a “diagnostic council”. The diagnostic council was one of the ways Murray endeavored to control for a very serious problem in writing psychobiographies. People who study the lives and stories of other people have stories and lives of their own. Just as the target of an investigation may not be fully conscious of the effects of his or her subjective experiences on the stories he or she tells, the investigator may not be able to place a rein on the influence of his or her own non-conscious issues and conflicts in the process of reading and interpreting another person's life. Murray's safeguard against the unknowing infiltration (he called it “projection”) of an investigator's own psychological dynamics into the life of the subject under the pretext of objectivity was the diagnostic council whose members served the function of all the king's horses and all the king's men, making suggestions and taking positions, and struggling to agree about which piece went where in the psychological design of the person.

The conclusion traces how the psychoanalytical approach utilised in late twentieth-century Freudian interpretations of Tasso’s life and work, by Margaret Ferguson and Giampiero Giamperi for example, had been pre-empted in English biographical accounts of the poet from the second half of the nineteenth century. J. A. Symonds and Leigh Hunt both focus on the same autobiographical poem, the unfinished Canzone al Metauro, as these later psycho-biographical readings to try to account for Tasso’s troubled relationships with his absent mother and particularly his father Bernardo. The conclusion argues that the absence of a clearly defined vocabulary for psychoanalytical discourse pre-Freud does not diminish the acuity of these earlier biographical observations on the poet.

Chapter 2 shows broad forces beyond competitive success in education and career that shape a person’s well-being, as revealed early in the mixed-methods longitudinal study featured in the book. Clinical life history interviews conducted in college and in late midlife show general patterns of how participants feel about themselves and their lives. These patterns subsume feelings participants have in discrete situations, roles, and areas, including their careers. The chapter captures this phenomenon by introducing a new construct of well-being called intrapsychic brightness and darkness, which is the central tendency of affect appearing in a narrative life history at a given time. Grounded theory analyses of the study’s interviews reveal two ends of a spectrum in this construct, described in the chapter and illustrated with short psychobiographies. Many participants show remarkable stability from college to late midlife in their intrapsychic brightness and darkness, in spite of tremendous change in life circumstances. These discoveries and the effort to explain them shaped the book’s investigation of human development and happiness.

Chapter 3 describes the positions along the spectrum of intrapsychic brightness and darkness and variation in longitudinal trajectories in the studied sample. Brief psychobiographies illustrate college and adult spectrums of this construct of well-being observed in clinical life history interviews; shifts in the sample’s presentation of affect from college to late midlife; and how significant change, a longitudinal trajectory exhibited by roughly one-third of the sample, differs from two other, closely related, trajectories—insignificant change and stability—which together account for roughly two-thirds of the sample. The importance of an individual’s relationship to his or her central strivings (to be defined later as life goals) is explained, helping to delineate the spectrum of intrapsychic brightness and darkness.

The final chapter closes the investigation of Livingstone’s legacy by extending analysis to the most recent biographical accounts of his life. Given metabiography’s insistence on the located nature of all biographical representation, even contemporary work cannot evade its analysis. Firstly, the focus is on the cultural phenomenon of debunking biography. While part of this re-evaluation has depended on important scholarly work, it also reflects a trend in biographical studies that has been aptly dubbed ‘pathography’. This term refers to the demythologising and excoriating approach that many biographers now take to their subject. Secondly, the chapter also investigates Livingstone’s place in ‘psychobiography’, a diagnostic form of life-writing in which the author plays analyst. For psychobiography, the biographee is less a subject for celebration than interrogation. Thirdly, the chapter investigates feminist biography, which has both reinterpreted Livingstone and recovered the story of his wife. In recuperating Mary, these works domesticate the hero while prioritising a marginalised subject. By surveying recent critical developments, the chapter argues that contemporary texts follow current biographical conventions and so cannot offer the conclusive word on Livingstone. While projecting themselves as definitive, these biographies are as ephemeral as those of the past.

In this period psychoanalysis became one of the most pervasive idioms of self-description, and biographers were not slow to adopt its insights. Attempts at writing ‘psychobiography’ are beset by pitfalls, many of which derive from the divergence between a therapeutic practice (involving dialogue between analyst and analysand) and the biographical situation (where the subject can’t talk back). Acknowledging the inherent riskiness of psychoanalytical approaches and the many ways in which they can fail, this chapter nonetheless makes a case for the formal inventiveness of major practitioners in this idiom, and the enduring importance of Freud’s legacy within biography, especially when contrasted with approaches that have emerged from rival forms of empirical psychology (such as behaviourism). The main figures discussed include Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Fawn Brodie, Alexander and Juliette George, Maynard Solomon, John Demos, Peter Gay, Janet Malcolm, Dan McAdams, Justin Frank, and Ian Kershaw.