A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Abstract

A Psychoanalytic Perspective Biography as a Western literary form began with fragments of lives in early Greek literature, but was launched as a professional endeavor by Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus in the first century, A.D. Since then, the significance of as a literary genre has waxed and waned. Bent to the purpose of ecclesiastical exhortation in its medieval incarnation, the lives of saints, was revived in the Renaissance by Sir Thomas More, William Roper, and George Cavendish, and assumed a variety of forms, both distinguished and scurrilous, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its Victorian version, the official tome of deadly propriety was replaced by the irreverent new biography which, by the late I920s and early I930s, made a major literary form, at least in terms of sales. Since then it has continued steadily to interest both popular and scholarly readers. Located somewhere between literature and history, has always been regarded with misgivings by its artistic and historical neighbors. Frequently the work of gifted amateurs, it has been viewed as simply an assemblage of facts requiring little in the way of literary art. Its potential subjects have regarded it apprehensively; not a few have taken pains to cover their tracks by destroying letters, diaries, and other shards of their existence. Historians have viewed it with even more concern, for some biographers, motivated to capture and recreate a life, have fashioned literary triumphs which are historical humbug. Further, is considerable difference of opinion about the role of the individual person in determining the course of events. For Ralph Waldo Emerson there is properly no history: only biography,