Description
Traditional biography often maintains a clinical distance between author and subject, leaving readers with a fragmented view of the emotional truths that shape a life. But what happens when the biographer steps into the frame-when the act of writing becomes a mirror for mourning, identity, and transformation?In an era where memoir and creative nonfiction blur the boundaries between fact and feeling, the stakes of biography shift. Loss, trauma, and personal history are not just background-they are catalysts. The emotional investment of the biographer can deepen insight, but it also risks distorting the subject. This tension lies at the heart of psychobiography, a genre that demands both rigor and vulnerability.Examining Lives is a rich, interdisciplinary collection of essays from the San Francisco Bay Area Psychobiography Group, spanning over two decades. Contributors-psychologists, historians, literary scholars, and artists-explore the lives of figures like Mark Rothko, Emma Goldman, Glenn Gould, and Alfred Hitchcock, while simultaneously reflecting on their own emotional journeys. Through themes of death, identity, and the porous boundary between self and subject, these essays reveal how biography can become a therapeutic, even transformative act. Whether mourning a loved one, confronting childhood trauma, or wrestling with professional identity, each writer uses psychobiography to illuminate both their subject and themselves.Examining Lives invites readers to see biography not just as a study of others, but as a collaborative, imaginative process that can help us understand our own lives more deeply.
Table of Contents
Foreword A Passion for the Particular Mark P. Freeman Acknowledgements Introduction Examining Lives: Self-Reflections in Psychobiography Stephen T. Walrod I: Death & Dying Chapter One Terminating Mark Rothko: Biography is Mourning in Reverse James E. B. Breslin Chapter TwoThe Psychology of Mourning in the Sculpture of Stephen De Staebler Ramsay Bell Breslin Chapter Three “The Intensity of Seeing for the Last Time”: Ferdinand Hodler and the Death of Valentine Go-dé-Darel Stephen T. Walrod II: Identity & Family Chapter Four C.S. Lewis and Shadowlands: Reflections on Grief, Biography, Film, and Personal Experience Madelon Sprengnether Chapter Five Shooting to Kill: Hitchcock's Heroines and the Perverse Scenario 3Marilyn Fabe Chapter Six From Rage to Re-vision: A Backward Glance at the Relation Between Personal Conflict and Professional Writing Claire KahaneIII: Self & Subject Chapter Seven Nearer my Subject to Thee: Thirty Plus Years of a Documentary Editor's Engagement with Emma Goldman Candace Falk Chapter Eight Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius Peter F. Ostwald Chapter Nine My Seventy Years with Elvis Presley: A Preface to a Psychobiography Alan C. Elms ConclusionStudying Lives in Different Disciplinary Subcultures: A Psychologist's Personal Perspective William McKinley RunyanContributorsIndex
