Psychobiography and the Study of Lives: William McKinley Runyan

William McKinley “Mac” Runyan is presently Professor, School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley; Affiliated Professor, Psychology Department, UC Berke-ley; and Research Psychologist at the Institute of Personality and Social Research, UC Berkeley. He received a BA from Oberlin College in 1969, with majors in sociology and psychology, and a PhD in Clinical Psychology and Public Practice from Harvard University in 1975. In addition to the pathbreaking book Life Histories and Psychobiography: Explorations in Theory and

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Method (1982), Professor Runyan also edited Psychology and Historical Interpretation (1988) and has a chapter, “Studying Lives: Psychobiography and the Conceptual Structure of Personality Psychology” in the Handbook of Personality Psychology (1997). He is a member of the Personology Society and is the 1986 recipient of the Henry A. Murray Award, given by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology of the American Psychological Association, for his contributions to personality psychology. Professor Runyan may be contacted by e-mail at . Todd Schultz interviewed this distinguished scholar at Berkeley on October 5.

William Todd Schultz (WTS): Please tell us about your early life and family background.

William McKinley Runyan (WMR): I was born in 1947 in New York City, where my parents had been living on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. From 1950 we lived in Cuyahoga Falls, and from 1961 in Hudson, Ohio. My parents were American citizens, of French, English, Scotch, and Dutch descent, and were Christian Scientists. My father was a lawyer for Goodyear Aerospace, then for Goodyear, in Akron. My mother was a housewife. Then, when my brother and I were finishing high school, she went back to school to get a PhD in English at Kent State University, and subsequently was a lecturer in English at Kent State and Akron University. Additional information on my family background and how it may be related to my work is in a chapter, “On Coming to Understand My Father: A Personal and Professional Journey,” in Between Fathers and Sons, edited by Robert Pellegrini and Theodore R. Sarbin.

WTS: How did you first get interested in psychobiography?

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WMR: When I started graduate school in 1969, there was a program at Harvard called Clinical Psychology and Public Practice. At an opening retreat that summer, I formulated the idea that what I was most interested in was studying life histories. At that point, I didn’t connect so much with psychobiography. Studying lives was a way to integrate interests I had in consciousness and subjective experience, and utopian communities, which I had written a BA thesis on. Studying individual lives seemed to be a way of looking at the kinds of experiences people have or could have in different societies or different social/cultural arrangements. So the program that I conceived then was to try to use social scientific methods to study individual lives—I wrote my PhD dissertation on that. In 1975, when I finished the dissertation, there was not much included on psychobiography; I thought it was too narrowly reductionistic in trying to explain lives by drawing on psychology alone, without attending enough to social/cultural/biological/economic factors. Then, when I started writing my first book, I found that good psychobiographies included much on social and cultural contexts, and were not reducing everything to psychological causes.

I ended up titling my book Life Histories and Psychobiography. That was partially because of a change of my own conceptions. Initially, I was doing just “Life Histories” and then, seeing that a lot of what I cared about was also being done by at least some people in psychobiography, I added that term. At first, I didn’t have a sympathetic exposure to psychodynamic theory. In graduate school I got more exposure to humanistic psychology, through those influenced by Carl Rogers, and also to behavioral critiques of psychoanalytic theory. It wasn’t really until after I got out of graduate school that I became more sympathetic to the value of psychodynamic theory, particularly for biographical interpretation.

WTS: What is the “School of Social Welfare” at UC Berkeley?

WMR: It is a professional school, giving MSW and PhD degrees in social work. I teach courses there on Human Behavior and the Social Environment, Personality Theory, and Life Histories and Case Studies. I’m also an Affiliate Professor in the UC Berkeley Psychology Department, which is a separate department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

WTS: What are you are working on now?

WMR: I am currently interested in the psychobiographical side of the history of psychology—examining relations between the life experience, work, and social-cultural contexts of major figures in the history of psychology. I’ve spent the last several years doing research on past persons in the Harvard Psychology Department, such as Henry Murray, Robert W. White, Erik Erikson, B. F. Skinner, Edwin G. Boring, and William James.

WTS: How would you describe your primary intellectual affiliation?

WMR: A primary interest is in the study of lives, as in biography, autobiography, and psychobiography. This overlaps with psychology, sociology, anthropology, and literature.

WTS: How do you define psychobiography?

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WMR: I define psychobiography as the explicit use of formal psychological theory or research in the interpretation of individual lives. According to this definition, there can be psychologically insightful biography, which is not technically “psychobiography” if it is not making explicit use of psychological theory or research. On the other side, not all psychobiography is psychologically insightful.

WTS: What is the relationship between psychobiography and personality psychology?

WMR: I see psychobiography as one particular way of pursuing the study of lives. I’m also interested in personality psychology in the ways that it overlaps with the study of lives. Personality psychology includes general theories of personality, efforts to measure dimensions of behavior, and studies of particular processes and of classes of behavior. I outlined my understanding of the relations between these four types of personality psychology in a chapter, “Studying Lives: Psychobiography and the Conceptual Structure of Personality,” in the Handbook of Personality Psychology (1997).

WTS: How do you feel about the expression, “All good biography is psychobiography”?

WMR: I would agree to the extent that much good biography is psychologically insightful. However, not all good biography makes explicit use of formal psychological theory or research. Other good biography might be primarily literary, social, cultural, or historical.

WTS: Henry Murray is considered by some to be the father of psychobiography, in that he championed the study of the person—what he called the “long unit.” What is your sense of Murray’s importance?

WMR: I think Henry Murray was important in advocating personality psychology and “personology” or the study of lives starting in the 1930s, with his publication of Explorations in Personality (1938). As director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic from 1928, he also inspired many workers in the field, including the distinguished co-authors of Explorations in Personality, such as Robert W. White, Erik Erikson, Jerome Frank, Donald MacKinnon, Nevitt Sanford, and others.

WTS: Who influenced your development?

WMR: Personally, Henry A. Murray was a major influence, with his enthusiasm, charisma, and encouragement, while I was in graduate school and after. Robert W. White was also more quietly supportive, even though we differed in approaches to the study of lives, with White encouraging more life history interviewing in the study of lives, while I was drawn more to methodological and theoretical issues. When I was an undergraduate at Oberlin College, sociologist J. Milton Yinger was an important intellectual influence, with his book Toward a Field Theory of Behavior (1965), integrating social, cultural, and psychological levels of analysis. At UC Berkeley, people at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (now the Institute of Personality and Social Research) were intellectually and personally supportive, such as Ken Craik and Ravenna Helson. A brilliant former doctoral student and now professor at Rutgers, Jerome C. Wakefield, who received doctorates in both Social Welfare and Philosophy from UC Berkeley, was important with friendly debates over many years about the relative values of conceptual-philosophical analysis (Wakefield) or biographical-historical analysis (myself).

WTS: What is the Society for Personology?

WMR: This is a small group of personality psychologists, many of them influenced by Henry Murray, which started meeting once a year in 1983 or so. Among the organizers were Silvan Tomkins, Rae Carlson, Brewster Smith, Ravenna Helson, Alan Elms, and Irving Alexander. It’s a group of psychologists with serious interests in the study of lives, with many interested in psychobiography.

WTS: What is your experience in teaching psychobiography?

WMR: I’ve taught a course at UC Berkeley, Life Histories and Case Studies, which includes much on psychobiography, ever since 1979. In recent years, I’ve used my book, Life Histories and Psychobiography; Alan Elms’ book, Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (1994); and a psychobiography by Robert Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (1977), as well as readings from Freud, Erikson, anthropologists, and others.

WTS: In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a lot of people are naturally looking very closely at the life of Osama bin Laden. Can a psychobiography of bin Laden even be done by a Westerner? Or is there a basic incommensurability between the Western and the Muslim mind?

WMR: I think a psychobiography of bin Laden could be done. A psychological analysis

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would be just one strand of an interpretation of bin Laden’s life and to do it well one would have to learn quite a bit about Islamic culture and social structure, his particular background in Saudi Arabia, historical events and processes, and so on. Some people are starting to do fragments of that. For instance, I noticed on the Internet recently that Jerrold M. Post, who formerly headed the U.S. government’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior that did personality profiles of foreign leaders, wrote a brief psychobiographical statement about bin Laden. It wasn’t done in a great deal of detail, but I think it could be elaborated as one strand of a biographical, cultural, social, political, and historical analysis.

I am going to get a better sense of this myself this spring in my course on life histories and case studies. In the past I have done a fair amount on Hitler and Nazi Germany, looking at psychological analysis of individuals, groups, and institutions. This year I may do Nazi examples briefly but I am hoping to spend a fair amount of the course thinking about psychologically and culturally informed studies of bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and some of the individual terrorists, and about understanding at the group level what is going on with different sub-groups within Islamic, Arab, and other populations involved.

WTS: I am sure we shall see a lot of bin Laden-related articles appearing soon.

WMR: I think we will. Such articles would be useful, if done well. But the question arises: How well does such work need to be done? It can be impossibly difficult to be perfect, but it could still be useful to produce work that is incrementally better than current understandings.

WTS: Is “usefulness” one of the cardinal criteria of a good psychobiographical study?

WMR: Yes, but “useful” in a number of different ways. One way relates to political purposes or military purposes. Another way relates to our cultural understanding of the achievements of great writers, artists, and scientists. Then there are personal uses, benefits connected to understanding people in one’s own life as well as oneself. Psychobiography can also contribute to clinical understanding.

WTS: The study of an individual could also lead to nomothetic hypotheses.

WMR: Yes, I think that can happen. But as I argued in Life Histories and Psychobiography, I feel it is important to include two other levels: group differences (by culture, gender, ethnicity, class, and historical period) and individual lives. One of the goals of psychology—along with understanding general theories and group differences—should be to make sense of individual lives, whether clinical cases, cultural heroes, or figures such as Hitler or, now, bin Laden.

WTS: Why do you think the field of psychology has such antipathy, in general, for the case study?

WMR: That is something that often puzzles me. I think there can be intellectual, personal, and political factors. Part of it involves an effort to “be scientific,” according to different conceptions of what that means. Part of it is personal, temperamental—some people are not comfortable with, or want to get away from, experiential case studies. I am sure, also, that there are social, interpersonal dynamics at work—imagining how one’s peers are going to react to case study research.

WTS: What do you think is the primary value of psychobiography to psychology?

WMR: The advance in our understanding of individual people and individual lives is one of the major objectives in psychology and in the social sciences more broadly. I like the argument Alan Elms makes in Uncovering Lives. He talks about his own trajectory, from working as a “hard scientist,” studying monkeys in the Panamanian jungle and working on Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority, to ending up studying psychobiography. Some of his peers thought he was going off the deep end by getting involved in more interpretive, historical psychology. But Elms saw it as coming back to the heart of psychology.

WTS: It is like the return of the repressed.

WMR: Or the return of some of the initial reasons undergraduates have for getting into psychology. Students may want to study individual lives, but sometimes that interest gets ground out of them as not sufficiently “scientific.” It is as if psychology has now gotten more scientific by being more quantitative and more experimental, and can therefore bypass the individual life. I don’t share that view. We can get more quantitative and more experimental, but can also increase our ability to understand individual lives.

WTS: How do you assess the work of psychologists who use quantitative methods to study history and lives, such as Dean Keith Simonton and Frank Sulloway?

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WMR: I think they are making important contributions to the field. My own interests are more in qualitative and interpretive approaches to the study of individual lives. Ultimately, it would be valuable to develop a better understanding of the relations between these different forms of inquiry.

WTS: I always think of psychobiography as the antidote to psychology’s excessive clinging to nomothetic or generalizing conceptions of science.

WMR: I agree. Studies of individuals can also be conceived as scientific in some sense. A phrase that Stephen J. Gould often uses is “historical science,” meaning analyzing “unique unrepeatable sequences of events.” He is talking about evolutionary biology or historical geology, but some of what he is saying applies also to unique sequences of events in individual lives.

WTS: How does one go about choosing a theory to use when looking at a life?

WMR: It can happen in a number of different ways. Sometimes one knows a lot about a life and then begins searching for a theory as a means of making sense of it. I think of Robert C. Tucker and the two-volume psychological biography he did on Stalin, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929: A Study in History and Personality, 1973, and Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941, 1990. He wrote a chapter about the process of doing the work in the book I edited, Psychology and Historical Interpretation. He had already known a lot about Stalin, having worked at the American embassy in Moscow and married a Russian woman. He wasn’t allowed to leave Russia until Stalin died. After encountering Karen Horney’s theory, he felt it explained a lot about the grandiose self-image that he saw Stalin actively creating. It was a case of happening upon a theory that seemed to fit. Another example is Robert G. Waite’s biography of Hitler, The Psychopathic God (1977). Waite draws on fragments from a wide variety of theories, including classical psychoanalysis and Eriksonian theory. He also makes use of empirical findings concerning people who are born with one testicle—which Waite believes was true of Hitler. So, rather than deciding in advance what theory one is going to use, another approach is to start with the life itself, and continually scan for theory and research which may be useful.

WTS: There are some psychobiographies in which the theory is more implicit than explicit.

WMR: One example is Alice James: A Biography (1980), Jean Strouse’s book on the sister of William and Henry James. There was an explicit attempt to make the theory invisible. My guess is that she used the theory fairly self-consciously but then in writing things up decided to keep it in the background.

WTS: Can a psychobiography be right in some way—revealing and persuasive—even when the theory one employs is dubious in terms of an absence of experimental support?

WMR: It seems possible with parts of psychoanalytic theory, because there are so many different defense mechanisms, for instance, and one can just leave out those portions of the theory that seem wrong. Another example is James David Barber, Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House (1972, 1992), which uses two or three different dimensions. Even though the dimensions seemed too simple, the way he wrote the book made what he said seem fairly persuasive.

WTS: One quality of a successful psychobiography is purely literary.

WMR: Some of Freud’s case studies relate to that. When I try to summarize his interpretation of a case like Little Hans, it sounds unpersuasive, but then Freud is such a good writer that when you read him, it seems much more compelling. It makes a big difference how skillful a writer one is in presenting interpretations.

WTS: It’s also interesting how people latch onto a bad psychobiography and use it to advance the specious argument that psychobiography is somehow intrinsically flawed. Some plumbers do bad work but that does not call into question the basic principle of plumbing!

WMR: People always pick on Freud’s mistranslation of the vulture figure in Leonardo, and argue that Freud’s whole book—the whole enterprise—is bankrupt. It doesn’t follow.

WTS: Have you ever found yourself idealizing or devaluing your subject, or so strongly identifying with a subject that it became a problem? When I was doing my dissertation on the writer James Agee, there was a period of time during which I thought I was Agee. I became aware of that, noticed it as a problem, and tried to get more distance from him, though I never succeeded entirely in doing so.

WMR: That particular phenomenon may have happened to me less because I seem to focus

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more on methodological and conceptual issues. I use examples of Van Gogh or King George III or Hitler, but I’ve never spent years and years working on one person. Except, I may have to modify that because I’ve been working on the lives of psychologists quite a bit lately, going back and rethinking aspects of Henry Murray or Freud or Skinner in surprising ways.

I probably idealized Murray, particularly in graduate school. That relationship meant a lot to me. Then I read and wrote a review of the Murray biography by Forrest G. Robinson, Love’s Story Told: A Life of Henry A. Murray (1992). That was very engaging and I spent a tremendous amount of time writing a review for Contemporary Psychology. I wanted to be fair to the book, to the different sides of Murray, and to my feelings about him. Yet, after writing the review, I was less satisfied with the book. It didn’t do justice to Murray in some respects—how charismatic and engaging he was to talk with. He was insightful about so many things.

The book argues how deluded he was, particularly in his relationship with Christiana Morgan. There may be something to that, but in the biography it may have been exaggerated. On the other hand, I learned a lot about their relationship that I hadn’t known.

I also learned a lot about the meaning of Herman Melville for Murray—how he got so engaged in Melville’s life and work, and particularly Melville’s novel Pierre. According to Robinson, Murray and Morgan saw a lot of their own relationship reflected in the central love relationship in Pierre. That may have been one source for Murray’s interest in the book and in Melville. And also why he wrote a 90-page introduction to Pierre later on.

It always puzzled me why Murray never published his biography of Melville, which supposedly reached around a thousand pages back in the 1930s. Robinson offers an interpretation of that, centering on how Murray was too involved with it, or how Melville’s life ended too tragically. Maybe Murray did not want to work through that period of Melville’s life, or maybe it was too revealing of Murray. So, I’m sure I idealized Murray, but I do so less now, partly as a result of reading Robinson’s book, and rethinking what Murray was doing and how he related to others. I also re-read a lot of Murray, and parts I admire, and parts I feel don’t work that well. I wonder if I met him again, would I feel differently about him? I expect I would, but he was still an important person in my life, and I’m grateful to have known him.

WTS: Sometimes my students will say: All these interpretations of a life are equal, and I can’t decide which one is right, and if that is true, then there is nothing to psychobiography, because all interpretations of a life cancel one another out. How do you reply to this?

WMR: If two or three interpretations seem fairly plausible, that is one thing. But it is unlikely anyone thinks all interpretations are equally plausible. I think one of the tasks of psychobiography is to look critically at interpretations over time, and to collect more evidence, so that some grow more persuasive and others less so. In Life Histories and Psychobiography, I examined 13 different psychodynamic explanations of why Van Gogh cut off part of his left ear and gave it to a prostitute shortly before Christmas in 1888. Some explanations seem less persuasive than others, especially those with little relevant evidence. One explanation of Van Gogh’s breakdown that seems to have considerable support is that Vincent, who was emotionally and financially dependent on his brother, Theo, may have been distressed at the prospect of losing the love and attention of his brother to his new fiancée.

WTS: That is the explanation my students tend to find the most persuasive. They also like the explanation that he did it because he was hearing voices and in his psychotic state he felt like if he cut off his ear the voices would disappear. It is always interesting to see which ones they find the most persuasive, because then you can start asking “Why?”. By asking that question you can start identifying qualities of persuasive explanations generally.

WMR: I think that is a good way of doing it. Explanations can be evaluated in light of criteria such as: 1) how logically sound they are, 2) how much of the evidence they account for, 3) how much they stand up to attempted falsification, or 4) how consistent they are with other knowledge you have about the person.

WTS: What do you think is the future of the field?

WMR: Such a big question. Maybe recent events suggest a response. One thing that led to an advance in psychobiography or psychohistory was so many scholars trying to understand Hitler, Nazi Germany, German character, or the psychology of anti-Semitism. Trying to understand some of the tensions in the relationships between the Islamic

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and Arab world and the Western world might produce a need for interpretations drawing on psychobiographical or psychohistorical factors, at the same time paying explicit attention to cultural history, religious history, and social and economic conditions. This might become a significant influence on the field.

WTS: Do you think psychobiography is becoming more acceptable within mainstream psychology?

WMR: I hope so, although there are signs on both sides. I think that the emergence of narrative interpretive approaches in psychology is encouraging. One of the challenges of psychology is to better understand how general theories and quantitative research interact with advances in our understanding of individual lives.

Schultz relates: “Around 1986, when I first became aware of psychobiography through a seminar taught by Alan Elms at UC Davis, there was one book the aspiring psychobiographer could turn to for guidance, support, and reassurance: William McKinley Runyan’s Life Histories and Psychobiography: Explorations in Theory and Method. It seems to me now that that one book—partly because of when it emerged on the intellectual landscape and partly because of its evident scholarship—did more for the field of psychobiography than any other book before or since (with the possible exception of Elms’ own Uncovering Lives). At some point “Mac” paid a visit to the seminar. He was a sincere, genuine, slightly quiet, totally unprepossessing scholar of warmth and generosity—an absence of ego combined with an abundance of hard-earned learning. Now that I have come to know Mac fairly well, my opinion has not changed in the slightest.”

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