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Matina Horner, former President of Radcliffe College, has noted in her introduction to the Radcliffe Biography Series that there are two aspects of biographical writing that are useful. “A fine biography is first of all a work of scholarship, grounded in the virtues of diligent and scrupulous research, judicious evaluation of information, and a fresh vision of the connections between persons, places, and events” (Horner, 1988, p. ix). In addition, she emphasizes that “reading about other people's experiences encourages us to persist, to face hardship, and to feel less alone” (p. ix). Finally, she observes that biographies enable us to look at ourselves in ways that allow for comparative reflection. What Professor Horner discusses about individual lives can also be applied to the history of scientific, philosophical, aesthetic, political, cultural, and religious movements. We learn something about the key individuals in these disciplines, their hardships, their ways of coping with problems, their relationships with other significant supportive or adversarial figures; the evolution of the discipline-style-body of knowledge; and what choices had to be made “breaking with the past,” mourning for what was changed, what was given, up, and the liberation following this adaptive mourning process, with its subsequent deployment of energy into new creative successor ideas, styles, directions, and applications.
Peter Homans, professor of religion and psychological studies in the Divinity School, professor of social sciences in the College, and a member of the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago, has written a scholarly book that gives us a new approach to the “biography” of psychoanalysis. His title, The Ability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis, reflects his general