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This book is in some ways a model for psychobiography, because it is first of all a good biography. Mack has attended to Freud's statement (in his Leonardo study) that the psychologist-biographer needs a great deal of historical data—sufficient material on what happened to his hero, what he did, and how he reacted. As Mack pointed out in his 1971 review article, "Psychoanalysis and Historical Biography,"1 Freud himself lacked the requisite detailed facts on Leonardo.
The author has done exhaustive research. Not only has he mastered his hero's published and unpublished work and the mass of books and articles written about Lawrence, but he has also contacted scores of people who knew Lawrence and his family. He has done all he could to evoke Lawrence's outer world: his family (the parent's unmarried status and the children's illegitimacy a focus for conflict and for mystery); his contemporaries; the political events that Lawrence helped shape. Lawrence's internal world is even harder to know, yet Mack has done remarkably well in relating the inner life of this essentially enigmatic man (who could lead and inspire and empathize but who could not love) to his creative work, to his political and military leadership, and to his time. Mack's awareness of the complex problems of the psychological biographer ("… limitations imposed by the availability of data … the limitations of method … the problem of integrating psychological material with data from other related fields"2) sets his tone—he