Psychobiography and autoethnography as a metalevel model of reflexive knowledge production: a historical positionality matrix

Abstract This study examines the emerging methodological link between psychobiography (PB) and autoethnography (AE) from a knowledge-production perspective, asking what this connection makes visible in the production of psychobiographical knowledge. It treats the authorial position as an analytical factor and renders the conditions of knowledge production visible and analyzable. The study develops the Historical Positionality Matrix (HPM), an integrated historical metalevel model that examines the subject–author–theory triad together with the knowledge-production space as a relational system changing over time. Using reflexive autoethnographic reconstruction, it analyzes contemporaneous and retrospective materials from an earlier research process, including research and reflexive journals, memos, correspondence, and peer-review reports, and comparatively reconstructs documented authorial position-moments from a non-WEIRD semi-peripheral perspective (WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic). The psychobiography of Rezső Seress serves as the principal illustrative case and theoretical trigger of the HPM. The model examines author–subject, author–theory, and subject–theory relations; the temporal change of all three elements and the knowledge-production space; and the configurations structured by that space. Its construction and recursive reapplication to the focal case show that the authorial interpretive position is a temporally changing epistemic position, documentable by relating historical time to research-reflexive time and comparing position-moments. The HPM also distinguishes descriptive fit from contextual adequacy and separates the presence and forms of agency from the structural convertibility of action outcomes. The HPM supports a form of psychobiography that is more historically sensitive, culturally and structurally contextualized, reflexive, epistemically transparent, and capable of analyzing the conditions of theory application.