Life History, Clinical Practice and the Training of Psychologists: The Potential Contribution of Psychobiography to Psychology as a "Rigorous Science"

Abstract

Psychobiography is a qualitative, idiographic research method; it is the explicit and systematic application of psychological theories and models in writing biographies and analyzing the life history, activity and personality of historically significant persons. This method has been used in the investigation of eminent creativity for more than a hundred years from now. It was originally created by Sigmund Freud; he and his followers made it popular among psychoanalysts in the first half of the 20th century, meanwhile American personality psychologists like GW Allport, HA Murray or Erik H Erikson also contributed to its development. Due to the hegemony of quantitative-positivist research in the 1960s and the 1970s this method was not favored, but-owing to the success of narrative psychology-from the 1990s we can perceive the renaissance of life history approach and psychobiography in personality psychology. In this article I will try to demonstrate that the application of psychobiography in the training of psychologists could have countless beneficial effects. The most important reason for it that using psychobiography in training could alleviate some major intellectual contradictions between university training and clinical practice, and it could also contribute to the development of psychology as a “rigorous science”. In order to understand the importance of this question first I have to analyze the scientific differences between clinical practice and academic research on ontological and epistemological levels.