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When psychology turns to autobiographies, it does not do so to examine the situations described in them or to reconstruct particular events or points in time; such research, interesting as it may be, is usually left to historians. Nor does psychology delve into the existent or non-existent literary qualities of an autobiography, or into the genre of autobiography as such; this is the realm of literary theorists. When psychology avails itself of autobiographies, it does so by asking psychological questions and from a psychological perspective. The most important argument for doing this is usually that working with autobiographical texts, in whatever form (they certainly need not be limited to published autobiographies but may include texts written at the explicit request of the researcher, diaries, and many other forms of autobiographical data; cf. Bruner 1990, e.g.), is the most effective way of gathering information for certain kinds of questioning. If the researcher is interested in studying the development of someone's identity, for example, hardly a better method can be devised than to ask the research participant to provide at regular intervals a text that is as subjective and personal as possible. Even when psychologists look at existing autobiographies, published or not, they do so in order to find answers to systematic psychological questions concerning such factors as psycho-social development, parent–child binding, and social relationships in general, guilt and shame, experience of sexuality, mental disorder, and many others. For the psychologist who is interested in religion, autobiographies may provide a great deal of information concerning the development of individual religiosity and the influence that certain forms of religion can have on the development of the personality.

DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-3491-5_11

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