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Psychobiography and the study of lives – an area of specialized study in the discipline of psychology – asserts that it is often clarifying and sometimes essential to analyze the life histories of intellectual leaders whose ideas have shaped social and cultural life. Psychobiographies can help us understand the personal and historical contexts of theory construction, dissemination, and reception, while providing interpretive clues to the complex process of theory development and institutionalization (Anderson 2005). In fact, William Runyan (2006) has argued that studying how the lives of scientists have influenced their scientific projects can help steer observers away from misleading causal abstractions. Uncovering the connections between lives and theories has great heuristic value. The study of lives can advance the study of ideas.Erik Erikson understood these possibilities and spent much of his long, productive life writing about the lives of historical figures who fascinated him: Hitler, Gorky, Jefferson, Luther, Gandhi, and of course, Sigmund Freud. Erikson saw the study of lives as critical to understanding historical events (e.g., The rise of Nazi Germany, the Protestant Reformation, India's Independence Movement) and he believed that persons influencing important social changes were leaders precisely because they were "working out" personal conflicts that were psychosocial in origin. In brief, these leaders were able to navigate personal, developmental transitions in ways that were relevant to their sociohistorical contexts, and they were able to engage and powerfully influence the public and political conflicts of their times – for good and ill. In advancing and developing such ideas, Erikson reformulated and sometimes implicitly repudiated the central ideas of his professional mentors, Sigmund and Anna Freud. While considering himself personally and professionally "loyal" to the founders of psychoanalysis, he nonetheless tried to expand the focus of psychoanalysis from its "vertical," geological drilling for the riches of intrapsychic toward an additional exploration of those dense surfaces of interpersonal, historical, and social geographies that contextualize human development.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4419-0748-6_4

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