심리전기적 연구방법론

Psychobiographical Research Methodology

Psychobiography is one of the research methodologies which explore the importance of a person, about whom statistical experiment can’t mine enough. Psychobiography is the explicit use of formal or systematic psychology in biography. In the beginning with Freud, psychobiography was defined just as the application of psychoanalytic theory, but now broader definition is accepted to include any kind of psychological theory. Psychobiography works to trace the uniqueness of a single personality in much the same way that we can recognize the particularity of a human face, or how it functions and comes to be irrespective of any reference group. The subjects are the ones through whom we can benefit richly by being closer to them, such as artists, politicians, psychologists, thinkers, with few exceptions. Schultz declares that the reasons of doing psychobiography, each arguing on behalf of the other: to cogently know another person, and to know ourselves. According to the quantitative analysis on the development of psychobiographical publications, fairly low level of studies were composed from pre-1920 up through the 1950s, and began to increase significantly in the early 1960s, with an accelerated increase in the 1970s. Psychobiography focuses on “what is the truth of the person?”It is phenomenological in the sense that it aims to describe the meaning of the personal experience, “the figure under the carpet”, as Leon Edel puts. Psychobiography can be said as a structural attempt. People are poems. As Runyan puts, every person can be interpreted in different ways and even in contradicting ways. Like poems, people can not be explained as to the degree as they are understood. Mystery’s elucidation is psychobiography’s most salutary aim. The odder the detail one sheds light on, the more convincing the interpretation. It is important to make evident what is not. Psychobiography is to manifest how a person’s inner world and life history influence the behavior of the person, without denying the psychological facts. It repeats the work of returning to the data with new questions. As Alexander puts, it is asking the data questions and letting the data reveal and speak by itself. Data is the tool for the interpretation. Ogilvie and Elms provide three examples of psychobiography at its finest. Mystery is artfully elucidated, theory and research reviewed, and a novel synthesis introduced. The reader is won over. Cogency is achieved. The problem of inadequate evidence are frequently being debated. It may be that the greatest contributions and interpretation of biographical evidence, without always attempting to relate adult behavior to child experience. In contrast to earlier psychoanalytic beliefs about the crucial impact of childhood experience upon adult behavior, there has been a growing belief that the effects of early deprivation can be substantially modified by later experience and that behavior and personality are shaped and changed throughout the life course. Watchel summarizes that early experience shapes early personality, not directly impacting upon adult personality, but rather influences later environments and experiences, which affects personality. Runyan sums that the effects of early experiences are mediated through a chain of behavior-determining, person-determining, and situation-determining processes throughout the life course. The key of good psychobiography, as argued by Erikson, is triple bookkeeping. The person’s life is comprehended on three complementary levels. Firstly, the level of the body and all of the constitutional givens. Secondly, the level of ego. Thirdly, the level of family and society. The narrative structure of a good psychobiography draws conclusions to follow naturally from an array of data with consistency. Ba