noel Chabani manganyi Psychobiography and the Truth of the Subject In its variety of forms, biography in the Western world has a fairly long and colourful history.1 It is one of the genres in which an attempt is always made to re-create a life. This recreation of a life is always an attempt and in writing about the truth of the subject—the authenticity of the recreated life—I will be emphasizing this provisional quality and character of life-history writing. Biography as a genre may be examined from different perspectives often defining the specific foci of particular subject fields. I propose to limit the major part of my discussion to an account of the opportunities, challenges and problems presented by psychological approaches to life study and writing. In the absence of a more satisfactory concept, I will use the term psychobiography as a kind of generic concept to cover the various formal attempts made by psychologists and psychoanalysts to describe their approaches to the study and recording of lives.2 It is in the psychobiographical study of lives (and here one should include the approach of the psychohistorian) that the promise of social science comes into its own. The psychobiographer can respond to C. Wright Mills' call made many years ago for the development to fruition of the sociological imagination. The sociological imagination is steeped in the politics of truth and it is the "urge to know the social and historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which he has had his quality and his being."3 Clearly, Mills may be described as the major psychohistorian because in a sense he anticipated Erikson and Lifton amongst others.4 What a challenge it is for social scientists to know that a study which fails to take account of Manganyi psychobiography and truth 35 the interaction between biography (life history) and history fails to complete its intellectual promise and value. The politics of truth is at the heart of the sociological imagination and scholarship at its best. The promise of psychobiography is this: it enables us to relive, appreciate and understand the life histories of individuals and their societies. Psychobiography at its best should make possible the restitutive appropriation of the past and should represent something more valuable than cultural play, myth creation and literary adventure. In captive societies, psychobiography possesses the potential of disturbing traditional lies, silences and can change a muted consciousness into a vocal and manifest consciousness. Yet, this important issue should not delay us any longer from moving closer to an analysis of specific aspects of the subject of our discussion. As we proceed, however, it should be helpful to keep these introductory remarks as a preface to observations I will be making towards the end of my discussion . My approach to psychobiography and the truth of the subject has as its starting point the crucial problem of what I would describe as witnessing . Witnessing in the study and "telling" of lives is intended in this instance as a descriptive term to cover activities and processes that are set in motion in the production of autobiographical accounts as well as the methodology and writing of life histories. In each of these activities and processes, some form of witnessing is involved though the actors or witnesses in each specific case may be different and multiple . The major actor, the major witness or to put the matter differently, the "focal person" of an autobiography or biography is commonly described as a hero(ine). After all, it is always he or she who lives the life, gives it meaning and lives it in its entirety as witness to his being. For this and other reasons, an examination of witnessing in relation to the truthfulness of biographical texts must surely begin here. One reason for concerning ourselves with the central character in biographical narratives arises from the fact that until recently the hero of a biography was most often an individual with a "status personality".5 The status personality is understandably often an object of cultural idealisation , a realisation which has been forcefully presented by Kris and Kurz in their classic study, Legend...
Read full abstract