My Journey as a Psychobiographer (article)

My first significant encounter with psychology was a course on experimental psychology during my sophomore year at Princeton. Each pair of lab partners received a rat and what we called a Skinner box. We put the poor creature through its paces, and it was amazing indeed that we could get it to do just about anything by either feeding it food pellets or subjecting it to an electrical shock. But psychology is supposed to be about what goes on in the mind. The behaviorists, brashly and without embarrassment, declared that they viewed the mind as a black box and didn’t care what went on there.

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Psychology seemed bankrupt to me, especially in comparison with Tolstoy, whom I first met in a course on Russian literature. Now there was someone who really knew what went on in the mind.

The breakthrough for me came during my senior year of college. I had an interest in India, due to my having spent a mind-boggling summer there as an American Field Services student before my last year of high school. Because of that interest, when I saw a book on an Indian topic by a heralded writer, I decided to read it; it was Gandhi’s Truth (1969) by Erik Erikson. Suddenly, I had a whole new idea of what psychology could be. Psychoanalysis, as described by Erikson, was a revelation to me and offered the same kind of insight that I had seen in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877).

Another major influence was Arthur Link, the foremost scholar of Woodrow Wilson. Having enjoyed his undergraduate course, I asked him whether I could take his seminar for graduate students. According to my admittedly somewhat unreliable memory, he said no undergrad had asked him that before but he didn’t see why not. So there we were, Professor Link, about seven future PhD historians, and I, talking weekly about the Progressive Era. Link’s emphasis throughout the seminar was on what was sound versus poor historical research and writing.

After finishing college in 1970, I was off to Harvard Divinity School and a three-year master’s program. I treated this period as what Erikson called a moratorium, a time during which I could figure out what I might do in the future. I had been playing with the idea of becoming a historian, and I remembered being puzzled about how what I did would be different from what any other historian might do. Thanks to the example of Erikson, I got the idea of learning about psychology and psychoanalysis and becoming a psychobiographer. I was required to enroll in half of my courses at the Divinity School and could sign up for the others anywhere else at Harvard. So, I took full advantage of the great treasures arrayed before me and completed as many psychology courses as would a psychology major.

A new idea came to me from hearing my first cousin, Nancy Kux, tell me about a psychology teacher of hers at the University of Michigan and then meeting him. I was impressed with his clinical work. Academicians, I felt, might improve people’s lives in a

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vague way, but there was no question that this man was making a concrete and dramatic difference in people’s lives.

I had been considering getting a PhD in history and learning psychology and psychoanalysis on the side. Suddenly, it seemed to make much more sense to get a PhD in psychology, preferably followed by psychoanalytic training, and do history on the side. That path provided the added benefit of enabling me to become a clinician and work with patients.

In 1973, I entered the Personality Psychology program at the University of Chicago. My intention was to teach psychology, work with patients, and do writing, primarily psychobiography. The Personality program was being phased out, so I transferred after my first year to the Committee on Human Development (HD) and received my doctorate in 1980. In HD I encountered the two professors, Marvin Zonis and Bert Cohler, whom I worked with closely. Both had gone through training at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Marvin had written a psychobiography of the Shah of Iran and Bert was a major contributor to psychoanalytic literature and served for several years as Editor of Psychoanalytic Psychology.

I yearned to write a psychobiographical dissertation. HD had a policy that although virtually all students did dissertations based on quantitative research, one could write on any topic as long as it was intellectually defensible. Marvin and Bert had no hesitancy in agreeing that a psychobiography could qualify. I chose William James as my subject, and the two of them provided me with heroic encouragement and guidance.

Another major influence on me during these years and after was Henry A. Murray, a legendary Harvard professor, emeritus when I knew him, recognized most for developing the Thematic Apperception Test. I had met him during my last year at Harvard and later spent two summers, 1975 and 1977, working as a research assistant with him. He had worked for years, and written more than a thousand pages, on a never-completed study of his beloved Herman Melville, of which I read several chapters. Though he provided a living example of a subtle psychobiographer, he discouraged me from writing a psychobiographical dissertation. He gave me advice I think he offered to many other graduate students, that I should do something narrow and technical now and save wider-ranging, more expansive work until I had greater maturity and

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experience. I countered that now was the perfect time to write a psychobiography. I would have the time to study the methodology of psychobiography and would have the benefit of the guidance of my advisors. He said something along the lines of, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and it seemed to me he might be rethinking his oft-repeated advice.

Before I could start on the dissertation, I had to pass my preliminary exam. Again I sought to do something unorthodox. Almost all students took a test in which they sat down for about three hours and, without their notes, answered questions that covered the areas of Human Development. But there was a rule in the books, rarely taken advantage of, that allowed students to create their own questions, to study the areas for several weeks, and then to write in the course of a day, with access to their materials, answers to those questions. One of my questions was on the methodology of psychobiography. I read everything I could find on that topic as well as a number of psychobiographies.

My answer to that question, an essay really, enabled me to kill three birds with one stone. It helped me pass the prelim exam, I used the essay as the first chapter of my dissertation, and it was published as “The Methodology of Psychological Biography” in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History (1981, 11: 455-475).

When I first started reading psychobiographies, even before studying for the prelim, I quickly saw that much of it was shoddily done and deserving of the heavy criticism showered on psychobiography; these works were reductionistic, based on inadequate research, and tended to foist theories onto the material even when they seemed not to fit. But there was subtle and convincing work, such as Erikson’s studies of Gandhi and Martin Luther as well as Leon Edel’s magisterial biography of Henry James. If I wished to become a psychobiographer, the place to start seemed to be the study of methodology, of what made for effective versus poor psychobiography.

I was also influenced by Link’s focus on what made for high-quality historical writing and by my UChicago teachers, most notably Robert LeVine, an anthropologist who had been a candidate at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. I loved his course, in which he eschewed a reductionist use of psychoanalysis in anthropology, as in studies that foisted the Oedipus complex onto cultures where it didn’t fit. Instead, he had a much more thoughtful

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approach to using psychoanalysis in studying cultures other than our own.

Methodology became my focus. Psychobiographer Joseph Ponterotto gave me credit as one of the pioneers in this area in an article in Qualitative Psychology, because of the paper that was based on my prelim. I followed that paper, in which I tried to figure out how to write psychobiography before undertaking my dissertation on William James, with another paper in which I looked at what I had learned from doing that psychobiography. Years later, I wrote another paper that I saw as an introduction to the writing of psychobiography for those who are undertaking it for the first time. Recently (with co-author Will Dunlop), I published “Executing Psychobiography,” which represents my mature statement on the topic.

While studying in graduate school for my preliminary examination, I read the psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson written by Alexander and Juliette George. It was fluently written and seemed convincing to me. On a visit to Princeton, I had lunch with Arthur Link, who knew Wilson better than anyone else, and he told me that the book was poorly done, especially because the research was woefully inadequate. The Georges, he asserted, had foisted a psychological interpretation on Wilson, although evidence from Wilson’s life contradicted the interpretation. Though a lowly graduate student, I boldly proposed to this revered professor that we would write together a critique of the Georges’ book, and he accepted. He later invited a friend of his, the neurologist Edwin Weinstein, to join us in writing the paper. The final paper included the critique that Link had discussed with me, with that section largely written by me. But it also emphasized Weinstein’s approach: in essence that Wilson’s problems were neurological rather than psychological. Ironically for me as a devoted psychobiographer, my first psychobiographical paper was seen as an attack on the very idea of psychobiography.

For three years I was an assistant professor of psychology at Williams College, where I learned that there is little or no place in academic psychology for a psychobiographer. Consequently, in Chicago since 1982, I largely earn my living as a clinical psychologist, while teaching generally a course per year as a “clinical” faculty member, and eventually clinical full professor, at Northwestern University and also for three years as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Like several of my professors in

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graduate school, I underwent psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, finishing in 1997 and serving on the faculty ever since. In my barely existent spare time, I have published a succession of psychobiographical papers. In addition to the ones on psychobiographical methodology, I wrote several papers based on my dissertation on William James and others on Sigmund Freud, Henry Murray, Donald Winnicott, Arthur Miller, Edith Wharton, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

I have two major projects-in-process. One is a return to Lincoln, who has fascinated me since childhood, and about whom I recently did a dialogue with biographer Chuck Strozier. I seek to write a psychological study, either a paper or a book, on Lincoln. The other is a book I’ve be working on for a decade or more and is a psychobiographical approach to major figures in psychoanalysis. I’m not certain of the exact lineup, but my latest selection is Freud, Erikson, Winnicott, and Heinz Kohut.

As I look over my career, what surprises me most is that I had the idea, in about 1972, of trying to combine seeing patients, teaching psychology, and doing psychobiography. For 47 years since then, I have done just that.

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