Handbook of Psychobiography

by William Todd Schultz (Editor)

This exceptionally readable and down-to-earth handbook is destined to become the definitive guide to psychobiographical research, the application of psychological theory and research to individual lives of historical importance. It brings together for the first time the world's leading psychobiographers, writing lucidly on many of the major figures of our age - from Osama Bin Laden to Elvis Presley. The first section of the book addresses the subject of how to construct an effective psychobiography. Editor William Todd Schultz introduces the field, provides valuable definitions of good and bad psychobiography, discusses an optimal structure for biographical data. Dan McAdams explores the question of what psychobiographers might learn from current research in personality psychology. Alan Elms delivers wise advice on the tricky subject of theory choice in psychobiography. William Runyan asks why Van Gogh cut off his ear, and in the process explains how one evaluates competing
interpretations of the same event in a subject's life. And Kate Isaacson describes a template for use in multiple-case psychobiography. Never before has method in psychobiography been so clearly and explicitly addressed. Those just getting started in the field will find in Section One a detailed roadmap for success. The remaining sections of the book are composed of richly engaging case studies of famous artists, psychologists, and politicians. They address compelling questions such What are the subjective origins of photographer Diane Arbus's obsession with freaks? In what ways did the early loss of Sylvia Plath's father affect her poetry and presage her suicide? Out of what painful life experience did James Barrie drive himself to invent Peter Pan? Why did Elvis experience such difficulty singing the song "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" What accounts for Bin Laden's radicalism, Kim Jong Il's paranoia, George W. Bush's conflict with identity? Why did Freud go so disastrously
astray in his analysis of Leonardo? What made psychologist Gordon Allport's meeting with Freud so pungently significant? How did the loss of his father determine major elements of Nietzsche's philosophy? These questions and many more get answered, often in surprising and incisive fashion. Additional chapters take up the lives of Harvard operationist S.S. Stevens, Erik Erikson, Edith Wharton, Saddam Hussein, Truman Capote, Kathryn Harrison, Jack Kerouac, and others. Within each case study, tips are proffered along the way as to how psychobiography can be done more cogently, more intelligently, and more valuably.

Genres: Psychology

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

William Todd Schultz is a personality psychologist who specializes in profiles of artists. He’s published four books—Tiny Terror on Truman Capote (2011), An Emergency in Slow Motion on Diane Arbus (2011), Torment Saint on Elliott Smith (2013), and The Mind of the Artist (2021)—along with numerous articles and book chapters. He curates and edits the Oxford book series Inner Lives. He’s appeared in Huffington Post, Salon, Slate, The Spectator, Seattle Weekly, and other venues. In 2015, Schultz was awarded the Erikson Prize for Mental Health Media; from 2016-2017 he was a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas; and in summer, 2021, he completed a Yaddo Artist Residency. He lives and teaches in Portland, Oregon.

Reviews

[Kathleen O'Neal · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been about a year and a half since I sat down and read an academic anthology from cover to cover and found it so thoroughly pleasurable, thought-provoking, and educational. The last time this occurred was in the summer of 2013 and the book was the newly published fourth edition of the Lennard J. Davis-edited Disability Studies Reader. Interestingly the other commonality the two books share is that both feature articles about photographer Diane Arbus, an artist whose work I was unfamiliar with prior to first reading about her in The Disability Studies Reader. My curiosity was piqued by the article in that anthology and the one in this volume is truly fascinating and I was thrilled to see that William Todd Schultz, the editor of the Handbook of Psychobiography and author of its Arbus article, has since written and published a psychobiography of Arbus which I now intend to purchase and read with due haste. Of course, the Arbus article is far from the only gem in the Handbook of Psychobiography. Other standouts include theoretical articles on psychobiography by Alan C. Elms, a surprisingly fair-minded and insightful assessment of the life of President George W. Bush by Stanley A. Renshon, excellent theoretical articles but Schultz, and a great theoretical article by Dan P. McAdams. This book was a joy to read and I highly recommend it to anyone even remotely interesting in the subject matter.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you.