Giving Voice to the Voiceless: Psychobiographical Reflections of a Psychobiographer

In 1980, I read Faces in a Cloud: Intersubjectivity in Personality Theory, Robert Stolorow and George Atwood’s (1979) seminal psychoanalytic study of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Wilhelm Reich. Their masterful psychobiographies linking the lives and theories of these psychoanalytic pioneers were a revelation, opening up a new intellectual and emotional universe. I saw with unmistakable conviction the way psychological and philosophical theories were not the isolated product of solitary contemplation but emerged directly out of the life experiences of their creators. I never looked at human lives or psychoanalytic theories, works of art, or philosophy the same way again.