The Biographer and Psycho-Analysis1

I am happy to pay tribute to the memory of Edward Hitschmann. His biographical enthusiasm, thoughtful scholarship and contributions to the field of applied psycho-analysis are known to us all. Few of us, I would venture to say, do not share Hitschmann's devotion to his subject. My task is to convey, as a biographer who has tried to use the psycho-analytic discoveries of our time, something of my theory and my method: and how I believe we can arrive at a closer understanding of our common ground. Are we not all, really, biographers and historians, biographers of the human spirit and of the soul—if we take biography in its broadest sense—even though we accomplish our biographical work in different ways and to different consummations? I know that a great many psycho-analysts listen every day to the most personal, and not always exhilarating, kinds of autobiography, and that when the time comes they must, in the very nature of their task, analyse their data, arrive at their essence and convert them into a kind of vocal biography. Moreover, you do this specifically for the subjects of your biographies; you—so to speak—write and rewrite a man's life under his very nose. What is more, you make him write and rewrite it himself! This is doubtless one of the fascinations of your task; it is also the envy of your fellow biographers, who deal with a more silent kind of data. You talk to your subjects: you even listen to them! Our subjects neither talk nor do they answer back. They are as inanimate as their pocket diaries, and their cheque stubs and all the personal memorabilia which they have left as record of their passage on this earth—the butt-ends, as T. S. Eliot might say, of their days and ways, out of which, if you please, the biographer is asked to reconstitute their lives. They come to life most often in the works they left behind; but the story of their lives must be recreated out of these fragments by the biographer. I say this not to express omniscie