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SINCE WORLD WAR II MANY REFLECTIONS ON THE NATURE AND method of biography have been published. As a glance at a library card catalogue will reveal, most of these treat biography "as a literary form." But recently it has also been considered as a type of history-writing, or even of social science, as a type of psychology-writing. These last two characterizations appear together in reflections on what is known as "psychobiography," a subspecies of psychohistory and also a branch of "applied psychoanalysis."
The literature on psychobiography—by historians, psychoanalysts, and general biographical practitioners—is mainly methodological. Commentators focus on how psychological—predominantly psychoanalytic—theory has been and ought to be applied to the data and documents, memories and memorabilia from which a biography can be constructed. This focus is, of course, not detachable from the question of which theory is to be applied. And so it has been the case that methodological discussion of psychobiography has generally followed the course of theoretical discussion of psychoanalysis: the first period of psychobiographical writing, through the 1920s, was dominated by early Freudian theory, while the postwar period has been dominated by various ego psychologies.
Regardless of whether or not they advocate a particular theory, methodological commentators have generally agreed about