Psychoanalysis and biography: aspects of a developing affinity

In examining some aspects of a growing affinity between the materials and problems confronting psychoanalysis and biography, the two disciplines most concerned with man in his historical totality, I have focused on the different methods used in these two fields of knowing about an individual's life and past. The early debt of psychoanalysis to biography, especially to its autobiographical sources, has been reviewed, and the unexplored potential of such documentary sources for our field has been suggested. The particular interest of diaries, especially in early adolescence, has been stressed. I have noted the relation of biography to clinical work, have stressed the historical and social context of a life and the relation between the actual and the psychologically transformed past. A biographical orientation leads inevitably to the question of how we learn about the past, and thus to the matter of documentation and the use of additional documentary materials in the treatment setting. I have concluded with a series of problems or questions for further consideration. These concern the use of "outside" documentation, the place of writing down dreams and experiences, and the use in treatment of information obtained by the patient or the therapist from other people, especially in preoedipal reconstruction and in our effort to understand character patterns not in evidence in the transference, which may be known primarily through their impact on other persons.