Assessing Leaders' Personalitiescepts—usually (but not always) drawn from psychoanalysis or some
other variant of personality theory and research—to the explanation
of certain known biographical "facts." Which facts? Some psychobi-
ographers focus on constructing a portrait of their "subject's" overall
personality—that is, describing "what kind of person they are."
Other psychobiographers set themselves a more limited goal of
explaining certain puzzling "facts" of patterns that cannot easily be
explained (or explained fully) by ordinary explanations such as ratio-
nal self-interest, the logic of the situation, or social roles and expec-
tations. A psychobiography, then, is different from a complete biog-
raphy of the ordinary kind: it may not necessarily tell the whole story
but rather focuses especially on behavior that is at odds with con-
scious goals and appropriate means, actions that are, in Freud's
words, "unusual, abnormal or pathological" ([1936] 1964, 239).
The Three Tasks of Psychobiography
How should a psychologist, psychiatrist, or historian go about con-
structing a psychobiography? Greenstein (1969, chap. 3) has
identified three separate components of the process. The starting
point is a simple description of what is to be explained—the surpris-
ing and unusual behaviors or, in Greenstein's terms, the "identifying
phenomenology." (A psychiatrist might use the term "presenting
symptoms.") As previously suggested, the phenomenology may
involve the person's entire life course, or it may involve only a part of
the person's life (sometimes a few acts or even a single act). For exam-
ple, George and George (1956) explored a wide range of behaviors
over the entire course of Woodrow Wilson's adult life (especially his
presidency). In contrast, Runyan's (1981) study of the Dutch painter
Vincent Van Gogh focused on a specific question: "Why did Van
Gogh cut off his ear?" Cutting off one's ear is the phenomenology,
the action to be explained by concepts and theories of psychology.
Notice that we turn to psychology for explanation because Van
Gogh's action was unusual. If most people (or at least most nine-
teenth-century Dutch painters) cut off an ear, then we would proba-
bly look elsewhere than psychology—perhaps to history or anthro-
pology—for an explanation. It is usually possible to get fairly good
agreement about this first step in the psychobiography process.
Having identified what is to be explained, the psychobiographer