ABSTRACT
Many authors of conventional biographies idealize the parents of their subjects; it must seem like bad form to say anything negative about the families of famous men and women. In addition, much of the evidence that the biographer relies on comes from earlier historical periods when an uncritical acceptance of parental authority was widespread, reinforcing this tendency. At the other extreme are those early psychoanalytic biographies, which focused on pathology. Psychoanalysis had its origins in work with disturbed individuals and its language is overweighted with descriptions of symptoms, traumas, fixations, perversions, and neuroses. At its worst, this distorts the individuality of the artist by forcing him into some general pathological category. Analytic experience has demonstrated the great formative importance of the childhood years, but this needs to be carefully spelled out in a way that does not conflate creative artists with neurotics, a way that does justice to the unique individual.
