ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author offers a brief and selective historical tour of biographical life writing that highlights some of the sources that it has supplied to current psychological perspectives, especially as these apply to persons. He considers contemporary psychobiography and discusses advances in the theory and practice of psychobiography before using some of his own work as a social developmental form of psychobiography to illustrate the kinds of understanding of personhood that might be drawn from such work. A form of life writing that holds particular significance for psychology, especially the psychology of personhood, is biography. Sometimes understood as a subgenre of historical writing, biography offers nonfictional, narrative accounts of the lives of individual persons. Biography in general and psychobiography in particular are indispensable to a psychology of persons. Psychobiographical inquiry can enrich its practitioner in ways that include but go beyond psychology and psychological insight.
