Adventures in Psychobiography and the Study of Lives: A Personal Journey

Abstract

Personal life histories are, I believe, interwined with the creation and development of every tradition in psychology. This includes psychoanalysis, behaviorism and humanistic psychology. A useful review of this work is in the Handbook of Psychobiography (2005). Examples in this chapter are Freud, Karen Horney and B. F. Skinner. We also look briefly at a post-modern critic of psychology, Michel Foucault. How important are personal experiences and politics in opposition to psychology? More recently, I have argued that individual life histories are also relevant in understanding philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, discussed in this chapter. Surprisingly, there may be more personal dimensions in statistics than assumed. Examples discussed here are Sir Ronald Fisher and Jerzy Neyman. This chapter reviews the adventures of an advocate of the study of individual lives interacting with supporters and opponents of the project through years as a graduate student at Harvard from 1969 to 1975, and as a professor at UC Berkeley from 1979 to 2010. With Gardner Lindzey (Lindzey & Runyan, 2007), I co-edited the most recent volume of the History of Psychology in Autobiography in 2007. This includes a wider array of perspectives than my own, with chapters by Elliot Aronson, Elizabeth Loftus, Albert Bandura, Walter Mischel, Daniel Kahneman, Ulric Neisser, and others. Many of these accounts are fascinating. I wonder, gentle reader, how has it been going for you? What experiences have you had encountering the variety of “hard” or “soft” traditions you have been exposed to? (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)