Book Review - Handbook of Psychobiography
Handbook of Psychobiography. Edited byWilliam Todd Schultz. New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. 380 pp.
What do we ask of a handbook? Enthusiasm for a subject or genre, guidance to the field, a review of its history, an introduction to core methods and cutting edge directions, and a sampling of case studies that can illustrate applied work. At the least it should initiate and instruct novices; ideally it will achieve such authority as to become a resource for practitioners.
Schultz and his colleagues score highly on enthusiasm for their project. Commitment to their own research interests leads to an engaging and in the main clearly written presentation of a range of interesting case studies. The chapters on artists and writers (Dianne Arbus, Elvis Presley, Sylvia Plath, Edith Wharton, in particular) and indeed on the biographical framing of some of the psychological theorists’ own enterprises (Freud, Allport, and Erikson especially) are always entertaining and often instructive.
Turning specifically to political psychobiography, the final five chapters of the book are devoted to this genre. This section opens with a review of problematics in political psychobiography by Alan Elms and Anna Song. Elms is one of the senior figures in this book, apparently the editor’s mentor (see the introduction) and well-placed to review methodology, given his earlier work on Personality in Politics (1976) and on Uncovering Lives (1994). His chapter here deals astutely with problems of methodology peculiar to political analysis, and with some contemporary examples. It is a good introduction for students of the field. Elm’s coverage of the history of political psychobiography is limited and partial in its emphases, but this chapter and an earlier chapter (on Elvis Presley) are among the most accomplished in the book.
Contemporary relevance is achieved with Anthony Dennis’s chapter on Osama Bin Laden and Stanley Renshon’s analysis of George W. Bush-both of them assured and illuminating. If there is a reservation about Dennis, it is that he relies almost wholly on American secondary sources, reinforcing an understanding of his subject within an American world view: a sampling of European and Middle Eastern documentation on Bin Laden provokes rather different questions. As for Renshon, he succeeds in explaining Bush’s transformational enterprise, and indeed how Bush relates personal to national transformation, and thus we get a strong sense of the psychological dynamics of what Bush feels himself to be engaged with. But this begs the more important question of why the Bush regime has been characterised by such faulty means of “testing reality” and of why it is so given to misjudgement and policy disaster in international relations-to the enor mous detriment of the U.S. reputation at large and American leadership in particular. Anna Song’s fascinating study of the difficulties in cross-cultural study of leaders (in this case, Kim Jong-Il) is the only sustained attempt in the book to see beyond the U.S. orbit, and is well worth having. Betty Glad’s study of tyrants reprises (and elaborates on) an earlier article for this journal on “Why tyrants go too far” (2002), but will engage new readers here and is a useful counterpoint to Renshon on Bush as a democratic leader. Reading across from Glad to Renshon, one is tempted to ask: What are the failures in American institutions that have allowed Bush to go too far?
The book is less successful in fully encompassing the field of psychobiography. It has an insufficiently interdisciplinary approach to methodology that renders it insensitive to some of the most interesting contributions to psychobiography; and it is historically and geographically limited. In relation to the first point, the problem is that most of the contributors appear to be refugees from an empiricist psychology, looking to psychobiography as a means of rediscovering the interest and complexity of lived experience that clinical psychology overlooks, and intent on taking the lessons back into psychology. Despite an interest in artists, writers, and politicians as subjects, this is a limiting stance for what should be a wide ranging handbook: implicitly, this is a text for psychology students. It is because of these blinkers, I suspect, that these authors fail to canvass a range of contributions that one might have expected to be derigueur in any overview of psycho biography. What should we make, for instance, of their blindness to psychohistory, and the contributions of its major practitioners to methodology and to psycho biography (Peter Gay or Robert J. Lifton, for instance)? How is it that early, foundational books by literary psychobiographers (Leon Edel’ s important Literary Biography, 1959, for instance) are not noticed? Is it feasible that a contemporary handbook in this field should entirely omit the challenge of feminist reinterpretations of psychoanalysis and ignore the contributions of feminist biographers to life writing?
The skewed reading of the history of the field is not unconnected with such blinkers. Despite the contributions to this collection of such longstanding scholars as Alan Elms, Stanley Renshon, and Betty Glad, the collection as a whole reads as if the field was pioneered in the mid 1980s, when the interests of most of these contributors were first kindled. Many contributors adopt the disarming tack of methodological autobiography (this was my research problem; this was how I handled it; this is what I found), without offering the perspective to be gained by reviewing alternative methods. The overall approach is inordinately self-referential. Despite Runyan’s laudable attempt to sketch a history (chapter 2), Schultz’s editorial framing gives the impression that the trailblazers were not psychologically informed Bloomsbury essayists (see Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex, 1928), not precursors such as Harold Lasswell (1930) though Henry Murray gets a run-not (from very different disciplines) Leon Edel, Robert Lifton, Peter Gay, or Fred Greenstein (from the 1950s to the present), but figures such as W.M. Runyan and Schultz himself. This is not to underplay the significance of, say, Runyan’s Life Histories and Psychobiography (which I recall reviewing appreciatively when it appeared in 1982), but simply to say that the sort of resource this collection aspires to be can only achieve authority by properly acknowledging that there were three or four scholarly generations earlier in this field whose innovative methods have not yet been superseded and who offer a much wider palette of options than these authors encompass.
The book also suffers from a geographical boundary-all its contributors are U.S. academics (not a problem in principle) and they appear not to read much outside the U.S. domain (which does impose limits). Even if designed as a handbook solely for U.S. distribution, surely its intended readers have much to learn from the practice of psychobiography outside America, even if only within the Anglophone sphere? Aside from examples of good British, Canadian, and Australian psychobiography too numerous to cite here, a casual scan of my shelves reminded me of the importance of the British object relations school (Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott especially) in British work on creative figures; of the eclectic and international theoretical scope of earlier U.S. publications on literary creativity (see, e.g., H. M. Ruitenberk, ed., The Literary Imagination, 1965); of Graham Little’s innovative use of Wilfred Bion in Little’s biographical essays on Strong Leaders (1988); of Alan Davies’ astute and succinct essay on the “Tasks of Biography” (1972); and so on. That is to say, the geographical boundary also appears to impose a theoretical boundary. That this need not be so is evidenced by looking at the international and theoretical comprehensiveness of other hand books, such as Bob Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann’s A New Handbook of Political Science (1995).
Given its enthusiasm, contemporary focus, accessibility, and brio, this collection will reach out to American college students and provide a useful resource. Its limitations of history, theory, and scope may prove an impediment in it reaching a wider audience or achieving the authority that would make it a ready reference for more advanced scholars and practitioners.
James Walter
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- 2018-07-21 李亮创建