Editor's Introduction

In her fascinating book on the psychology of Sylvia Plath's biographers and literary custodians, the irrepressible Janet Malcolm (1994) compares the biographer with a “professional burglar,” and goes on to state that the “voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of bank-like blandness and solidity … The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography's status as a popular genre. The reader's amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidding undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole” (p. 9).

To be sure, secrets, voyeurism, transgression, collusion, and keyholes are of interest to psychoanalysis. So is biography. At the same time, reducing the human epistemophilic instinct to its (partial) origins in childhood sexuality is a mistake. Long before Malcolm, the distinguished analyst Herman Nunberg (1931) also fell prey to the similar charm of simplicity. The fact, however, is that our desire to know about the life of those with fame and power emanates from complex and multilayered sources.

It is therefore not surprising that from its early days psychoanalysis has made forays in the realm of biography. Some of these yielded deep insights regarding the human mind. Others were met with skepticism. Note Freud's own writings on Schreber, DaVinci, Dostoyevsky, and Moses in this regard. Later analysts broadened their net and valiantly strove to take social context, historical era, political climate, and even hereditary predispositions into account before explaining the behavior of their protagonists on a purely psychological basis. Erikson's work on Martin Luther (1958)