Psychobiography

Psychobiography is the study of biographical subjects, usually historically significant figures such as artists, writers, scientists, and political leaders, through the systematic application of psychological theory and research. Where conventional biography aims at comprehensive narrative coverage of a life, psychobiography is selective and explanatory: it isolates particular episodes, patterns or decisions and attempts to account for them in psychological terms. The field sits at the intersection of personality psychology and historical scholarship and is generally treated as a form of case study research applied to lives documented in the historical record rather than to clinical patients. It is closely related to, and partly overlaps with, psychohistory, which extends similar interpretive methods to groups, movements and periods. Psychobiography is conventionally dated to Sigmund Freud's 1910 study Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood , and for much of the twentieth century it was predominantly psychoanalytic in orientation. Since the 1980s the field has broadened to encompass narrative, object relations, existential-phenomenological and trait-based frameworks, and has developed an explicit methodological and ethical literature in response to sustained criticism of its evidentiary standards.