Books about Psychobiography from Amazon.com

A most stimulating and original work that sheds much needed light on Napoleon's troubled inner world, Avner Falk's biography examines Napoleon's family background, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and death and offers new and novel explanations for his numerous irrational, self-defeating, and self-destructive actions..
Price: $26.06 [Notify me when price goes down.]

His Brother’s Keeper explores the mystery of what drove suicidally depressed Samuel Taylor Coleridge to drop out of college, assume a fictitious identity and enlist in the army to atone for a crime he never committed Four years later, in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the poet once again relived the nightmare of his undeserved guilt, this time creating a world-renowned poem in the process. This book is a psychological study of survivor guilt and of the idealistic, troubled partnership between Coleridge and William Wordsworth. An in-depth exploration of Coleridge’s life and art which reads like a novel, it offers insights into the creative process and a clinical examination of the poet’s addiction. Hooked on opium by the age of 30, he destroyed his marriage, his friendships and his creative imagination. His final, hollow years were spent living on his laurels as the writer of several of the most famous poems in the English language..
Price: $18.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This exceptionally readable and down-to-earth handbook is destined to become the definitive guide to psychobiographical research, the application of psychological theory and research to individual lives of historical importance. It brings together for the first time the world's leading psychobiographers, writing lucidly on many of the major figures of our age - from Osama Bin Laden to Elvis Presley. The first section of the book addresses the subject of how to construct an effective psychobiography. Editor William Todd Schultz introduces the field, provides valuable definitions of good and bad psychobiography, discusses an optimal structure for biographical data. Dan McAdams explores the question of what psychobiographers might learn from current research in personality psychology. Alan Elms delivers wise advice on the tricky subject of theory choice in psychobiography. William Runyan asks why Van Gogh cut off his ear, and in the process explains how one evaluates competing interpretations of the same event in a subject's life. And Kate Isaacson describes a template for use in multiple-case psychobiography. Never before has method in psychobiography been so clearly and explicitly addressed. Those just getting started in the field will find in Section One a detailed roadmap for success. The remaining sections of the book are composed of richly engaging case studies of famous artists, psychologists, and politicians. They address compelling questions such as: What are the subjective origins of photographer Diane Arbus's obsession with freaks? In what ways did the early loss of Sylvia Plath's father affect her poetry and presage her suicide? Out of what painful life experience did James Barrie drive himself to invent Peter Pan? Why did Elvis experience such difficulty singing the song "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" What accounts for Bin Laden's radicalism, Kim Jong Il's paranoia, George W. Bush's conflict with identity? Why did Freud go so disastrously astray in his analysis of Leonardo? What made psychologist Gordon Allport's meeting with Freud so pungently significant? How did the loss of his father determine major elements of Nietzsche's philosophy? These questions and many more get answered, often in surprising and incisive fashion. Additional chapters take up the lives of Harvard operationist S.S. Stevens, Erik Erikson, Edith Wharton, Saddam Hussein, Truman Capote, Kathryn Harrison, Jack Kerouac, and others. Within each case study, tips are proffered along the way as to how psychobiography can be done more cogently, more intelligently, and more valuably..
Price: $54.12 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Despite an abundance of literature on Nixon, the man behind the most spectacular crash-&-burn career of modern political history has remained an enigma. This is the first thoroughgoing psychol. portrait of the 37th pres., drawing upon telling interviews with Nixon intimates, published & archived materials, & employing a rigorous psychoanalytic methodology. Tracing the development of Nixon's complex psyche, the authors provide new insight not only into his unconscious motivations but also into the way they influenced his political actions. A more nuanced, more humanized Nixon emerges in a book that also provides compelling evidence that the politics of a nation is subject to the unconscious needs, fears, & fantasies of its leaders..
Price: $25.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]