Psychoanalysis and Psychobiography

What is a psychoanalysis and why psychobiography?

Sigmund Freud found the idea of psychoanalysis, which dealt with the unconscious and conscious mind of a person. He believed that every dream, thoughts, and emotions were somehow connected into the repressed unconscious mind during a person's childhood years. What Freud did to his patients was to ask them questions and let his patients threw out their dreams and emotions as he explored the cause of those results.

In a same way, Robert Waite wrote a psychobiography of Adolf Hitler in his book called The Psychopathic God (1977). In his book, Waite discussed that Hitler was mad due to his many incapabilities and illnesses. Waite believed that the cause of Hitler's violence resolved from his past experiences and childhood traumas. Adopting Freud's theories on how a child had repressed sexual feeling, Waite concluded that Hitler himself had the same experience.

According to Waite, Hitler was brought up in a very violent family environment. His father, Alois Hitler, was a military man. Due to his business as a military man, he was always away, and that left Hitler and his siblings with their mother. The close relationship between the mother and son was interpreted as an Oedipus complex. Most of the time when Hitler's father came home, his parents would always fight, and if they did a sexual act, Hitler took this as a sadomasochism (sadism and masochism). He saw his father as a rival. We can see in his later life on how Hitler found satisfication in killing 3 million Jews.

Waite believed that "every basic of childhood lives on, in some form, in the adult." Combining the ideas from Freud and Erik Erikson, Waite stated that Hitler was a man who became what he was because of his childhood experiences. As was researched by a Russian autopsy, Hitler had only one testicle (monorchids). Only because of this, Waite discussed on how this disfunctional organ became relatively the driving force of Hitler's madness and cruelty.

In psychobiography, the subject is not present. It tends to be inaccurate because there is no specific event that deals with the adulthood matter. Unlike psychoanalysis, the psychiatrist can ask them about how they feel and see their body language. In psychobiography, the subject may be long time dead.

There are several criticisms that were proposed by Milton Lomask in his The Biographer's Craft of writing psychobiography. Firstly, the biographer tends to use faulty and inadequate evidences because the subject is not present and it is impossible for biographers to question his subject. Then secondly is that the biographer tends to have missing evidences. Psychobiographers also tend to have unfairness for their subject. Everything about psychobiography deals with neurotics and psychotics. In other words, it is easy for them to write down outcomes due to an event, which, in one sense, the event itself is of a little insignificance. The fourth criticism that Lomask brought up is that research is the most important factor of writing a psychobiography. Psychoanalysis tends to focus more on the unconscious and subconscious mind of a human being. But we all know that there is also a certain aspect that can influence the mind, which is the surroundings. A thorough research on historical events during that subject's period of time will help to make a better assumption. The fifth one is prejudice. A psychobiographer must be neutral at all times. If he does not like his subject, it is very easy for him to pick an event that can support his subject's negative actions. Again, psychobiography is merely a speculative approach of how different biographers view their subjects. Technical terms are often the most complicated part of writing psychobiography. Psychobiographers tend to write difficult terms and to simplify them means to lose its essence in what he meant. The last part of Lomask's criticism is simplism. Complex adult life is often simplified in order to understand about the subject's childhood behavior.

-by angeltjo
* an AAH 102 - Biography and History - exam studies. (for Monday, Nov.27, 2006)