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Our identification with great leaders, artists, and royalty, and our fantasies about them, create the popular literary genre of biography. Psychobiography claims to go above (and below) delectable gossip, which we all savor, and to be able to explain the origins of leadership, charisma, and artistic creativity, while using psychological
theories and data. Beyond psychobiography is the dream of predicting and identifying greatness. How can we explain the development of historical greatness? What are its early “symptoms”?
The book before us is about a great a charismatic leader, whose life the author has thoroughly researched. Relying on the enormous literature, the book contains 1,728 footnotes, as well as primary sources. (The reference system is, regrettably, one used by many scholars in the humanities, which is often impossible to follow.) The author deals with several topics in Lincoln's life and public career. These include Lincoln's depressions, his married life, his hatred of slavery, his aversion to women, his anger and cruelty, his “father figure” behavior, his role as a real father, and his ambition. In addition, Lincoln's midlife crisis, which transformed him into a true statesman, is discussed. The writing style is easy and the narrative easily accessible. Lincoln emerges as a real human being, not just any human being, mind you, but one that most readers will fall in love with, just as the author did.
When it comes to the “psycho” part of this self-defined psychobiography, we discover that the author has only little knowledge, and that derived from a few ill-chosen sources. Most of the supposedly psychological notions are taken from the writings of Carl Gustav Jung, but here the use of Jungian ideas does not move beyond the level of recitation and incantation.
The author states:
The source of Lincoln's power can be found, I believe, in what Carl Jung called an archetype. Throughout this volume, I rely on the insights of Jungian psychology, which maintains