Examining Lives Self-Reflections in Psychobiography

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.

William McKinley Runyan's Life Histories and Psychobiography (Oxford University Press, 1982) was the first major study of psychobiography and related psychological case studies. He edited Psychology and Historical Interpretation (Oxford, 1988), and in 1986 received the Henry A. Murray Award for his contributions to the study of individual lives and whole persons. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1975. From 1979 to 2010 he was a Professor in the School of Social Welfare and Affiliate Professor of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley. He became Professor Emeritus in 2010.

Alan C. Elms is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. His Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (Oxford, 1994) established him as one of the major figures in the field of psychobiography. The Handbook of Psychobiography, edited by W. T. Schultz (Oxford, 2005) includes four chapters by Elms. He also wrote Personality in Politics (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976) and Social Psychology and Social Relevance (Little, Brown, 1972). He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1965 and the Henry A. Murray Award in 1987 for his contributions to the study of individual lives and whole persons.

Ramsay Bell Breslin, MFA, California College of the Arts (2005) is an art writer, academic editor, and former publisher (Kelsey Street Press). Her essays have appeared in Fort Da, The Threepenny Review, FRAMES, and the East Bay Express.