News and Updates
NEWS UPDATE -- April 23, 2007
This website was down for several months while my
long-time Webmaster, Palyne Gaenir, shifted from one service
provider to another and worked to find the best way for me to maintain
the website myself. Palyne put in a lot of pro bono work on the
website over several years, and I am grateful for all she did.
The general look of the website will remain as she established it, but
I will be adding a good deal of new content during the next several
months.
I am now using a program called Nvu, which enables me to
add or revise website content mostly by using standard Word
commands rather than doing a lot of heavy HTML formatting. I am not yet
by any means skilled at applying Nvu, so some of the new material --
especially the indexes that appear in the left-hand column on most
pages -- may look pretty messy for a while. But I hope the actual
content is readable; if it isn't, let me know.
The first items I've added, mainly to experiment with Nvu, are the
transcript of a talk I gave to the American Psychological Association
some years ago, and a couple of book reviews published rather more recently. I
gave the talk on the occasion of my receiving the Henry A. Murray
Award for career contributions to personality psychology. Titled "The
Psychologist as Biographer," it sums up my general approach to
psychology through psychobiography, and offers some reasons why more
psychologists should practice psychobiography, at least part-time.
Its content overlaps considerably with the first chapter of my
book , Uncovering Lives, and
indeed that first chapter was drawn largely from the talk. (The book's
first chapter is available elsewhere on this website.) But the
talk is more argumentative and at times critical about the
refusal of many psychologists even to consider the potential or actual
worth of research on individual lives. By the time I wrote the book,
I had decided that perhaps a more diplomatic approach
would be more persuasive to more people, so I softened my language
and omitted some of the criticisms of others. But I still think those
criticisms are apt, so here they are -- look for "The Psychologist as
Biographer" in the Articles portion of the Virtual Library section.
The first book review, which I've titled "Posthumanity How?", manages to
express my critical views about a still-trendy idea among some science
fiction writers and artificial-intelligence experts, by discussing an
excellent but hard-to-read book by the brilliant science-and-literature
scholar N. Katherine Hayles. The trendy idea is that human beings will
rather soon be able to achieve near-immortality by downloading the
content of their brains into computers. I invite them to give it a try;
I agree with Kate Hayles that human psychology is so deeply imbedded
(conceptually as well as literally) in human bodies that such
downloading would result not in a posthuman state but in a sadly
inhuman state at best. It is also a highly impractical way to preserve
one's individual personality, though Hayles does not go into those
impracticalities in her book, ironically titled How We Became Posthuman.
The second book review, which I've titled "Rebelliious Laterborns," deals with an important book by Frank Sulloway titled Born to Rebel. The book is
concerned with the effects of being a firstborn or laterborn on one's
later creativity in science, politics, the arts, or other areas. Frank
and I became friends in the early 1980s when we were both visiting
scholars at Harvard. At that time he was already working on the
research that evolved into this book, but it took him over 15 years to
finish it. My main interest in the book is that it's partly
psychobiographical, though Frank also worked hard to accumulate and
quantify data from many individual lives. My other interest in it is
that I'm a firstborn and Frank is a laterborn, and we thus have
somewhat different perspectives on how we both ended up, in certain
significant regards, as rebels in our fields. I've seen very little of
Frank in the past quarter-century, but his research in several
different areas continues to intrigue me. This book made some waves
when it was published 11 years ago, but the waves were not as tall as
it deserved.
I
know that book reviews are not much valued by academic promotion
committees, but I put a good deal of work into reading these books closely
and trying to write thoughtful assessments of them. (Both reviews are
located in the Articles portion of the Virtual Library sectionof this
website.) For my most recent book review -- which is long enough
and detailed enough to be designated as a "review-article" by the
journal editors -- please see the current (March 2007) issue of Science Fiction Studies;
I'm not allowed to reprint it here for at least a year. (But if you ask
nicely, I might send you a copy.) The review-article summarizes
and
discusses Julie Phillips's truly exceptional biography of the
science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., who also happened to be an
experimental psychologist named Alice Bradley Sheldon. I've written
elsewhere about Alice Sheldon's brief career as a psychologist; Julie
Phillips goes into much more detail about Sheldon's entire life history
and her several careers, especially about how she found an emotional
home for herself in the male persona of James Tiptree and a mostly
satisfying literary home in the science fiction world. Her book won
this year's National Book Critics Circle Award for best biography of
the year, and I'd say it has the inside track to win the Hugo Award for
best science-fiction-related nonfiction book of the year.
Alan Elms
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