Love’s Labor Lost and Found: My Relationship with Psychobiography

My tale of a love for psychobiography, lost and regained, starts in my first semester at Amherst College in 1976 with a seminar entitled “Other People’s Youth.” We read biographies of prominent individuals focusing primarily on their formative early years. Most importantly, we started our course by reading Erik H. Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958) and finished the semester with his Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (1969). In between, we pored over biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson, among others.

Having grown up with two psychologist parents (Jerome L. and Dorothy G. Singer), I was fascinated to see how Erikson incorporated psychoanalytic concepts into the familiar literary genre of biography. As an 18-year-old in the throes of my own adolescent psychosocial development, it was mind-boggling for me to contemplate that the forces driving Luther’s religious revolution were possibly not only spiritual but deeply rooted in earlier psychological struggles regarding his father. With my father playing a somewhat

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larger-than-life role in my life due to his significant accomplishments in psychological research, this formulation definitely caught my attention.

Highly engaged with literature and writing poetry in high school, I continued to explore these interests with an English major at Amherst. At the same time, following my family’s path, I also pursued a psychology major. In my psychology coursework, I soon learned about the sanctity of the scientific method, the power of inferential statistics, the rigor of controlled conditions, and the dangers of subjective bias. I received my father’s persuasive counsel about the arbitrariness of non-empirical theorists (particularly psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists) and their speculative pronouncements on all matters of human interaction. Although originally trained in psychoanalysis in the 1950s, he had subsequently embraced laboratory research by the early 1960s. With his colleague, John Antrobus, he had conducted the first experimental studies of daydreaming, which included measurements of eye movements, coding of stimulus-irrelevant thought production, and developing a reliable and valid daydreaming scale. Nevertheless, he had a penchant for literature, especially Henry James. However, this was for the day’s end and perhaps an elegant quotation to begin or finish a paper—not the substance of a psychologist’s true positivist calling.

Although increasingly aware of this experimental emphasis, I still found opportunities in my psychology coursework to engage with a more holistic approach to individual lives. In my sophomore year, Thomas Cottle was invited to serve as a visiting professor. I signed up for his course, “The Life Study,” and another powerful dimension of psychobiographical analysis opened up to me: the study of ordinary life in all its evocative complexity. Cottle originally trained in sociology at the University of Chicago and later developed a career as a clinical psychologist and media expert. However, his early books were powerful first-person portraits of young people from diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds. In our small, intimate seminar, he asked each of us to identify a person from the community outside the college and develop “a life study.” What exactly this meant to all of us (who were mostly psychology students) wasn’t exactly clear. To orient us, he gave us readings, such as Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About It (1974) and Robert Coles’s Children in Crisis, Vol 1: A Study of Courage and Fear (1967).

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Since I was already volunteering at a Veteran Affairs hospital not far from our campus, I chose to ask one of the patients on the psychiatric unit, a young man diagnosed with schizophrenia, to participate in the project with me. I found the assignment to portray his struggles, sense of humor, and consistently kind nature to be one of my college career’s most profound learning experiences.

I next learned of a visiting undergraduate student program at Harvard that allowed me to take courses with one of my newly discovered heroes, Robert Coles. I applied and was accepted to spend my junior year at Harvard, where I was able to take a course with Coles. The opportunity to read more of his thoughtful work, listen to him lecture, as well as have more personal conversations with him continued to encourage me to see at both the individual and the societal level the power that the careful presentation of a single life experience can hold.

I also felt the parallel presence of my father’s guidance, reminding me that the path to a PhD program in clinical psychology (which by my junior year was becoming my clear professional goal) would require a track record of research activities that were preferably laboratory-based. Luckily, he connected me to John Kihlstrom, a young professor in the Psychology and Social Relations Department at Harvard. Kihlstrom was already an accomplished researcher in the scientific study of consciousness with a particular interest in hypnosis and non-conscious processing.

Kihlstrom helped me to see the importance of my father’s work in the field, particularly how he had modeled ways for researchers to examine experimentally meaningful aspects of conscious human thought that had been understudied due to the dominance of psychoanalytic theorizing and clinical extemporizing. Kihlstrom showed me how psychologists, similar to my father, were studying imagery, stream of consciousness, fantasy, dissociation, hypnosis, and autobiographical memory. This, in turn, deepened my conversations with my father and allowed us to share exciting intellectual ground, including pointing me to work by one of his own mentor’s, Silvan Tomkins. I began to learn about Tomkins’s Affect and Script theory, intriguing alternatives to Classical Psychoanalytic drive theory.

Also, while at Harvard, I connected with Dan McAdams, a doctoral student working with David McClelland on motives and personality. (This link to McAdams took on much greater meaning

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later and has lasted throughout all subsequent decades.) I ran a study to support their research activities. Through these connections, I began to learn more about Henry Murray (another connection to Silvan Tomkins) and other illustrious past members of the Harvard department, Gordon Allport and Robert White. For the first time, I became aware of psychology’s “personological” strand.

Entering my senior year of college, I faced the inevitable question of how I would make a living. As we had often discussed, my father made it clear that he truly hoped I would pursue a PhD in clinical psychology. If I wanted to continue writing poetry, I could combine this with a clinical practice and some teaching. I wondered if I might emulate Robert Coles’s life study writing and pursue this path in my graduate study. My father expressed his great respect for this work as an eloquent voice for societal reform, but he also made it clear to me that this was not where the action was in clinical psychology programs. In fact, he emphasized that if I pursued this line of inquiry, I would be less likely to build the kind of profile that would make me a good fit for a top-notch clinical psychology doctoral program.

This conversation clearly had a profound impact on me, and there is some irony in it too. My father, as I came to learn from my subsequent time in graduate school and then over my career in clinical psychology, was one of the most humanistic and intellectually eclectic academic psychologists I have ever encountered. Yet, as one of the literal founders of doctoral training in clinical psychology after World War II, he had a determination to see clinical psychology continue its development into a rigorous quantitatively based science of human behavior, emotion, and thought. With the best of intentions, this was the direction he urged me to take.

I had managed to build up a strong enough record of research at Amherst, Harvard, and over summers at Yale that I was able to secure admission to a number of clinical PhD programs. I ultimately chose to continue research at Yale on the psychophysiology of emotion, which I had conducted in previous summers, based in Gary Schwartz’ laboratory. Yet, even as I began my graduate training, I still felt torn between my literary and more scientific pursuits. I was auditing courses at the Yale Drama School. However, I was simultaneously sitting in on lectures on neuroanatomy at the Medical School. Toward the end of the year, one of my professors took me aside and said that my philosophical queries about the validity of laboratory approaches to understanding human behavior

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were all well and good, but that if I did not give myself over to the experimental emphasis of the program, the “train would leave the station, and you won’t be on it.”

Through my work in Schwartz’ lab, I began to notice the unusual power that the recall of powerful memories could have on individuals’ emotional states. Building on the work I had done with Kihlstrom on social-cognitive models of personality and then connecting these ideas to the emerging cognitive science models that incorporated Tomkins’s script theory, I sought to develop a research program that would examine individuals’ most enduring and vivid personal memories. The challenge of explaining why certain memories in an individual’s life persisted and became central touchstones in their self-understanding was a rich and not yet deeply explored area of investigation. While I was developing this line of research, Ulrich Neisser, Martin Conway, Marigold Linton, and David Rubin were expanding cognitive psychology to include “everyday” memory and urging cognitive psychologists to break out of list learning paradigms and explore memory in the “real world.”

I now felt a burst of intellectual excitement about my work in the “science” of psychology that had previously only occasionally flickered. To me, individuals’ significant personal memories were like brief lyric poems filled with imagery that provided an enduring record of our lived experience. Contemplating the opportunity to study these memories and see how they might inform our understanding of personality and psychotherapy seemed a compelling and worthy endeavor. I found my ambivalence about being in the program at Yale dissipating, and my commitment to developing a systematic methodology and quantitative approach to the topic of personal memory in personality and psychotherapy took hold. This work grew into my dissertation and then my development of “self-defining memories”: vivid, emotional, well-rehearsed autobiographical memories that reflect enduring themes and/or conflicts central to an individual’s sense of identity.

As I was crafting my ideas about self-defining memory, the intellectual influence of Dan McAdams re-entered my orbit and played an increasingly important role in my thinking about personality and memory. His work had shifted from motivational analysis to a larger emphasis on the stories that individuals construct to account for the major themes of their identity. In fact, he began to assert that these stories were the essence of identity for individuals

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in contemporary society. He argued that the stories we tell of our lives provide the unity and purpose that contribute to an ongoing and coherent sense of self. I could see that self-defining memories could play a critical role within this framework, akin to key passages that highlight critical themes in the larger life story.

As my research career developed, I also finished my clinical psychology training and continued gaining experience as a psychotherapist. In my postdoctoral year, I was confronted with a significant life decision I had not fully anticipated when I began my doctoral studies at Yale five years before. Should I pursue a career in clinical work, taking a position offered to me in a clinical psychology department at a psychiatric hospital, or make the next level of commitment to academic psychology and accept an offer for a tenure track position in the psychology department of a liberal arts college? I chose the latter for multiple reasons, but relevant to this essay was my continued intellectual excitement about researching autobiographical memory and its role in personality and emotional experience. I felt a position with a primary academic rather than clinical focus would afford me more opportunities and time to continue this intellectual agenda.

I started my career at Connecticut College in the summer of 1988. Once there, I began a series of careful quantitative studies on self-defining memories with graduate and undergraduate students at Connecticut College. My first book, The Remembered Self: Emotion and Memory in Personality (1993, co-authored with Peter Salovey), laid out the theory and methodology for studying these memories. The succeeding 30+ years have generated numerous self-defining memory publications from my lab and other labs worldwide (see http://www.self-definingmemories.com). While continuing my clinical work, I was able to write up several case studies for publication, drawing on McAdams’s and my own developing ideas about “narrative identity,” with a particular emphasis on the role of self-defining memories and Tomkins’s script theory. Representative examples of this work can be found in my books Message in a Bottle (1997) and Personality and Psychotherapy: Treating the Whole Person (2005), as well as a more recent article from 2019, “Repression is the scent of the hunt: A clinician’s application of narrative identity to a longitudinal life study.”

A pivotal moment in my journey back to psychobiography took place when McAdams invited me in the mid-90s to sit for membership in the Society for Personology, a small invitation-only

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group of researchers committed to the tradition of Henry Murray’s multi-method and holistic study of individual lives. I began to attend the annual meetings of approximately 15-20 participants, which included a number of researchers central to the field of psychobiography: Jim Anderson, Alan Elms, and Mac Runyan. Other members (e.g., Irving Alexander, Ravenna Helson, Ruthellen Josselson, Paul Wink) emphasized the central significance of studying lives, often longitudinally and with a relational emphasis. The Society was welcoming to qualitative and case study research, while perhaps at times it expressed a bias against nomothetic research that highlighted specific variables rather than whole people. Silvan Tomkins was a founding member, along with Rae Carlson, who had written a classic critique of social psychology and personality psychology entitled, “Where is the Person in Personality Research?” In the decade after I became a member, Todd Schultz joined the Society. Along with the others mentioned above, his participation expanded my exposure to psychobiography and contemporary work in this field.

By 2010, Schultz had signed with Oxford University Press to edit a series of psychobiographical volumes. He encouraged members of the Personology Society to consider submitting proposals. Around this time, I found myself at my in-laws’ home for the December holiday without a book to read. Perusing their shelves, I stumbled on a recent well-annotated copy of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (originally published in 1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson. I knew of Stevenson from Treasure Island (1882), one of the most beloved stories from my childhood. (I loved the film with Jackie Cooper and Wallace Beery and played out the story endlessly with my puppet theater.) Having never read Jekyll and Hyde, I found myself completely entranced by the novella and read it from cover to cover in one sitting. I was stunned by how engaging and fresh it was despite being more than 100 years old. Reading more about Stevenson—his family of lighthouse engineers; his travels through Southern France; his time in upstate New York and Monterey, California; his American wife; and his final years overseeing a large plantation in Samoa—I realized this was a rich psychological study for Schultz’ series.

This project, which extended over five years, brought me fully into the world of psychobiographical research. Over the course of my primary research, I was able to visit multiple sites where Stevenson had lived in Scotland, England, and the United

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States. I spent hours combing through archives at various libraries and museums with Stevenson holdings. Highlights included having dinner in Stevenson’s childhood home with its current owners, hiking in rain and mud on the West Highland trails featured in David Balfour’s adventures in Kidnapped (1886), and sharing a coffee at Oxford with Stevenson biographer Claire Harman. In the United States, while visiting the Stevenson Museum in St. Helena, California, the curator brought me to a bank vault in town and, with white gloves, I held original pages from the Jekyll and Hyde manuscript. Back closer to my own home, I delved into the Stevenson archive at the Yale University Beinecke Library, one of the best collections of his rare papers in the world, and I was able to examine his unpublished typed and handwritten memoirs.

Ultimately, the psychobiographer must narrow their inquiry to a psychological concern or set of concerns that lend themselves to a theoretical application and analysis. Given my interest in narrative identity, my task was to see how Stevenson’s most significant memories could elucidate fundamental conflicts and themes in his life that weave through his writing. As my book’s title, The Proper Pirate: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Quest for Identity (2016), implies, my analysis zeroed in on the tension he experienced from early childhood between his constricted Presbyterian upbringing and his delight in transgressive and romantic fantasy and adventure. I traced self-defining memories that reflected this ambivalence and found many connecting threads in his stories, novels, poems, essays, and letters, allowing me ultimately to extract a narrative script that captured key episodes of emotional reaction and meaning-making in his life. Chronically ill all his life, Stevenson died prematurely at age 44 of a stroke. However, I assert that he died with much of this conflict resolved in a manner that brought him a sense of self-understanding and a degree of resolution about his lifelong struggle. As a result, some of the stories he completed toward the end of life reflected a new level of complexity and sophistication, suggesting he still had much fine work still ahead.

This venture into psychobiography had reinvigorated the ardor that I had felt all those years ago in reading Erikson. It was deeply interesting and gratifying to focus on an individual life and view it from all vantage points: historically, socio-culturally, and intra-psychically. I found myself seeking a new subject to continue this work, and this brought me back to a college course I had taken on two prominent religious figures as well: Thomas Merton and

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Abraham Joshua Heschel.

As a practicing Jew, I had continued to read and be guided by the spiritual writings of Heschel, a rabbi and philosopher. I had the lovely confluence that my instructor for the Merton-Heschel course, Edward Kaplan, had gone on to write a two-volume biography of Heschel. As I dove into the first volume, I came upon a depiction of a recollected moment during Heschel’s period of doctoral study in Berlin that struck me as a quintessential “prototypical scene.” Todd Schultz defines the prototypical scene as a galvanizing memory in an individual life that becomes the dominant motif for that person’s major conflicts. To identify a memory of this fashion, one must determine how it “interpenetrates” other moments and self-depictions in an individual’s life. It should also have an emotional intensity, usually focused on a developmental conflict, and express a degree of crisis or violation of the status quo. As I read through the two volumes and turned to many of Heschel’s writings and essays, I identified other memories and critical incidents that reinforced this pattern of tension and awakening, allowing once more for the extraction of a meaningful narrative script (Singer, 2022).

I have continued to employ narrative identity analysis in psychobiography, with a recent article applying this framework to the life and lyrics of the Grammy-winning contemporary singer-songwriter and activist Brandi Carlile (Singer & Lombardo, 2023) in this very journal, as well as to the life of an accomplished African American attorney, Lonnie Braxton (Hamlett & Singer, 2023). Both recent efforts reflect a commitment that the field of psychobiography has made to expand the range of its subjects and to recognize lives that have often been pushed to the margins.

In this spirit, Jonathan Adler and I co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Personality (Adler & Singer, 2023) that focused on psychobiographies of social change agents. In our original call for articles, we reached out to organizations that supported researchers of diverse backgrounds both domestically and internationally, especially emphasizing traditionally underrepresented groups in the field of psychobiography. We sought to encourage a younger generation of scholars too and invited some to make a first foray into researching and writing a psychobiographical study.

As documented in our Introduction to the special issue (Adler & Singer, 2023), we built a sense of community among the

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co-authors through shared Open Science registration, assigning the various authors to serve as peer reviewers on the manuscripts, and even meeting by video to provide feedback and guidance through the editorial process of manuscript revision. The resulting collection of articles covered a wide and extraordinarily diverse set of subjects ranging from Australia, China, and South Africa to an indigenous community in Montana, inner-city Detroit, and the White House. Not only were the subjects more representative of contemporary life, but so were the theoretical frameworks employed to profile them. For example, various authors drew on critical race theory, narrative identity, relational psychoanalysis, structural analysis, and ecological systems theory, along with other conceptual approaches.

Looking back on what amounts to nearly 50 years of psychological studies, it is gratifying to see that I have been able to return to what I now see as my first love in those initial weeks of college, reading Erikson’s captivating evocation of Martin Luther’s spiritual awakening. I have returned to fundamental questions of understanding a person—how to make sense of a life in its most complicated and comprehensive fashion with a particular concern for the interior life of memory, dream, fantasy, and psychodynamic conflict. Yet, the years have added an increased appreciation for the historical, cultural, and sociopolitical contexts in which that life is lived. I did indeed follow my father’s guidance to build a strong quantitative academic career, but I was also able to make a humanistic turn through psychobiography that has brought a new and vibrant dimension to my scholarship.

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