You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Recently, I was talking with a friend who knew I had just completed a biographical study of William James, the American psychologist and philosopher. My friend asked, “Well, after all of this time, do you still like him?” “Yes”, I replied, and without a moment's pause added, “And I think I could have helped him too”. My friend's indulgent laugh made me realize that I had said something that sounded absurd. What could it possibly mean for a contemporary psychiatrist to say of a man whose letters and diaries he had read, and who had been dead since 1910, that he could have “helped him?” This essay is an effort to narrow the gap between the innocence of my offhand remark, and the truth that I believe underlies it.
Critics point to the therapeutic stance of the psychobiographer (and psychobiography is the genre of psychohistory that concerns me in this discussion) as a defect of procedure that makes the outcome of questionable value to historians. Richard Ellmann, (1971) for example, wrote of Erikson's (1958) Luther: “Ultimately Erikson's work is not so much biography as delineation of therapeutic possibility”. And he dismissed it ironically. There was “no doubt”, he said, that “post-humous therapy would help a good many of the dead …” (p. 4).
Rather than representing an absurd methodological flaw, I would argue that an imagined therapeutic relationship with a biographical subject, adds to the tools available for reconstructing the past with rigor. Furthermore, I would extend that therapeutic intent beyond the subject, to the biographer himself, and ultimately to his imagined audience. I will illustrate my thinking with experiences from my research into the life of William James and his family.
What therapists of different psychoanalytic persuasion do is perceive the trajectory of a life, and if need be, with our patient's permission