Examining Lives: Self-Reflections in Psychobiography (Explorations in Narrative Psychology)
Language: English
Published by Oxford University Press, 2026
- Hardcover
- New
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Add to basketSeller Inventory # 9780199342556
- Title
- Examining Lives: Self-Reflections in Psychobiography (Explorations in Narrative Psychology)
- Author
- Elms, Alan C. (Editor)/ Runyan, William McKinley (Editor)/ Breslin, Ramsay Bell (Editor)
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Publication year
- 2026
- Condition
- New
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0199342555
- ISBN 13
- 9780199342556
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.
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
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.
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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