Psychobiography and Life Narratives edited by Dan P. McAdams and Richard L. Ochberg Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1988,  340 pp., $18.00

This book evolved from a special 1988 issue of the Journal of Personality on Psychobiography, a journal not known to most medical psychoanalysts. It offers a multidisciplined approach to the study of personality. The approach uses psychoanalytic theory along with other personality theories. The journal's editors believe in a more comprehensive approach to psychobiography than is offered by psychoanalytic theory alone.

The book contains 11 chapters, most written by psychologists, many of whom call themselves personologists. I have selected for critique four chapters of special interest to psychoanalysts. The remaining chapters I will not comment on because of space limitations and because they are of less interest to psychoanalysts.

The final chapter, called “Progress in Psychobiography” and written by William McKinley Runyan, is a good starting place. It reviews the history of psychobiography and then chronicles its progress. The first psychobiography is Freud's book on Leonardo in 1910. Freud later wrote psychobiographies of Goethe, Dostoevsky, Moses, and finally, with William Bullitt as his coauthor, on Woodrow Wilson. Most early psychobiographies were written by psychoanalysts.

Alexander George (a political scientist) and his wife Juliette (a social anthropologist) wrote a psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson, titled Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House (George & George, 1936). Subsequently, authors from other disciplines including historians, sociologists, personality psychologists, and literary critics wrote psychobiographies. Erik H. Erikson (1958), a psychoanalyst, wrote comprehensive psychobiographies of Martin Luther and in 1969 on Ghandi. Erikson developed a birth-to-death life-stage chronology that provided psychobiographers with a broader frame of reference. From the 1950s to the 1990s psychobiographies increased in number and in quality. Accompanying this numerical