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 Uncovering Lives - Content |
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Uncovering Lives - Content |
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Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology Alan C. Elms Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1994 Contents Part One: Why Psychobiography? 1. The Psychologist as Biographer 3 "The word psychobiography looks innocent enough. It's a syllable too long to come trippingly off the tongue, but it gets easier with practice. It has good Greek roots, which separately entered the English language a long time ago. And it means pretty much what it says: biography that makes substantial use of psychological theory and knowledge." [pp. 3-4] 2. Starting from Scratch 19 "So this chapter will offer a variety of specific, basic suggestions about how to get started as a psychobiographer-especially about how to collect the data you'll need when you try to understand a life. Even if you're absolutely sure you're never going to write a psychobiography, I suggest you give the chapter a try. It will take you Behind the Scenes, and in the process it should transform you into a more perceptive reader of psychobiographies." [p. 19] Part Two: The Heart of the Theorist 3. Freud as Leonardo 35 "Freud's Leonardo offers much to criticize. But it is by no means the best work of which psychobiography is capable. Indeed, its errors leave it far from the best work of which Freud himself was capable. By using the book to present a number of sound guidelines for writing psychobiographies, Freud showed that he knew better. Then why did he violate virtually every one of those guidelines, in the very book in which they appear? That's where his sex life comes in. But before we get to the sexy parts, we need to look at other aspects of the book's origins." [p. 37] 4. The Auntification of C. G. Jung 51 "But I would suggest that when Jung accused others of trying to 'auntify' his autobiography, it was an issue to which he was particularly sensitive because he had felt certain inclinations in the same direction. Perhaps someday, when all the Jung archives are opened to scholarly researchers, someone will finally piece the Urtext together and we'll get Memories, Dreams, Reflections as Jung (in both of his personalities) meant it to be. Parts of it will still be censored, bowdlerized, auntified versions of episodes in Jung's life; his honesty had its limits as everyone's does. We'll need to keep those limitations in mind as we read the Revised Standard Autobiography. But it will finally and fully be Jung's own myth, and that's well worth having." [pp. 69-70] 5. Allport Meets Freud and the Clean Little Boy 71 "Allport's series of denials, toward the end of the passage just quoted, indicates one of the ways in which Freud's question ['And was that little boy you?'] hit home. According to Allport, 'Freud had thought that I was suffering from an infantile trauma. I wasn't. If he had said I was a brassy young American, he would have been right. But, he didn't. . . . I don't deny that there may be traces of infantilism in all of us or traces of neurosis in all of us" (my italics). But that is just what Allport had denied about himself, perhaps silently at first but promptly and vigorously. Then he said it aloud, over and over again, in essentially these words: I am not that little boy with the dirt phobia. Keep that sentence in mind-Allport's core response to Freud's interpretation of his behavior-as we examine each element of it." [pp. 79-80] 6. Skinner’s Dark Year and Walden Two "Every one of Skinner's major theoretical tenets, which he had supported by empirical research on nonhuman organisms and then applied fictionally to the populace of Walden Two, can be seen as related to the family frictions of the Dark Year [in his early adulthood]. Skinner's mother had always relied heavily on techniques of aversive control to regulate his behavior, largely through variants of 'Tut tut, what will people think?' Such attempts at aversive control, from both mother and father, appear to have reached their height -- or at any rate Skinner became excruciatingly sensitive to them -- during the Dark Year. In Walden Two, such aversive control is repeatedly described as one of the outside society's worst ills. It is linked with the negative emotional states that must be eliminated . . ." [p. 98] Part Three: Into the Fantastic 7. The Thing from Inner Space: John W. Campbell, Robert E. Howard, and Cordwainer Smith 8. Darker Than He Thought: The Psychoanalysis of Jack Williamson 9. Asimov as Acrophobe 10. The Mother of Oz: L. Frank Baum 11. Nabokov Contra Freud Part Four: Beneath Politics 12. Carter and Character 13. The Counterplayers: George Bush and Saddam Hussein 14. From Colonel House to General Haig Part Five: Other Methods, Other Lives 15. Going Beyond Scratch Notes Bibliography Index
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