Alan Elms: Personality in Psychobiography
Interviewed by Kate Isaacson for the psychohistorical journal Clio’s Psyche
Alan Elms was born in 1938 in Texas, and grew up in Arkansas, California, and Kentucky. He received a BA in psychology from Pennsylvania State University in 1960 and earned his PhD in personality and social psychology at Yale University in 1965. After teaching for three years at Southern Methodist University, Dr. Elms joined the psychology faculty at the University of California, Davis, in 1967. He taught courses in personality theory, psychobiography, and political psychology to undergraduate and graduate students for many years. [In 2002, after this interview was published in Clio's Psyche, he became an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at UC Davis.]
Dr. Elms was a founder of the Personology Society and has been a long-time member of the Bay Area Psychobiography Working Group. He has received numerous honors for his work, including the 1988 Henry A. Murray Award, given by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA), for career contributions to personality psychology. His books include: Role Playing, Reward, and Attitude Change (editor, 1969), Social Psychology and Social Relevance (1972), Attitudes (1976), Personality in Politics (1976), and Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (1994). Uncovering Lives earned a CHOICE Magazine award as one of the “Best Academic Books of 1995.” In his final year of teaching before retirement, he received a UC Davis faculty research fellowship that took him to the University of California Washington Center in Washington, DC, to teach undergraduate seminars on personality and politics and to do research at the Library of Congress. He continues to work on psychobiographical studies of Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) and Carl Jung, and is planning to write a book on “the Freud Wars.” Kate Issacson interviewed this distinguished scholar at UC Davis and by phone and e-mail in the fall of 2001.
Kate Isaacson (KI): What influence did your early environment have on your interest in psychology?
Alan Elms (AE): When I was 10 or 11 and living in Arkansas, I began reading newspapers every day. I found two kinds of articles especially intriguing: those on UFOs and those on the behavior and various bizarre or just deliberately funny statements of Arkansas politicians. Then we moved to San Diego, where in 1950 my father took me to an anti-Nixon rally, when Nixon was running for the U.S. Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas. Nixon at that point was an entertaining person to be against. When we moved back to the South several years later, this time to Kentucky, Happy Chandler was the governor. He had been baseball commissioner and was a very amusing character, though as governor he was close to being a total idiot. I had fun writing satirical pieces about him for the local newspapers.
KI: What did your parents think about your going into psychology?
AE: My father would have preferred that I go into some other “more scientific” area such as nuclear physics. I had declared at 12 or 13 that I wanted to pursue a career as a writer. He and my mother had both reacted very strongly against that idea, mainly in terms of “This is an uncertain profession” and “You’re not going to have a steady salary.” My mother asked, “What if you run out of ideas?” So I went into psychology, in part to earn a regular salary while still pursuing a career as a writer.
KI: Frank Sulloway (Born to Rebel, 1996) describes first-borns as typically less rebellious than later-borns. As a first-born, how do you identify with his characterization?
AE: On his questionnaires I come out as an “honorary later-born,” partly because of a considerable degree of adolescent rebellion against my father. In comparison to my five siblings, I have both shown the most initiative and been the most rebellious. Sulloway’s research does not sufficiently take into account sheer individual variability.
My father was the last boy among nine children and was, in his own way, a somewhat rebellious individual. One of the points of issue between me and my father was that I usually preferred staying inside, reading books, when he wanted me to be outside hunting, fishing, or farming. But one of his older brothers told me that when my father as a young teenager was supposed to be out working on the family farm, he’d sometimes instead climb up on the roof of the house, out of sight, and read books. I saw this earlier rebelliousness as something I could emulate. I was academically an excellent student, but at times I resisted when teachers tried to make me do something that I saw as unreasonable or unfair. My father would be outraged at the teachers and he’d write letters to the newspapers, denouncing the teachers and criticizing school policies. He was not someone who obeyed orders without question. As with psychobiographers Mac Runyan and Jim Anderson, I’ve written a non-fiction piece on my very early life in the form of an essay about my father, due to be published shortly in Between Fathers and Sons, edited by Robert Pellegrini and Theodore R. Sarbin.
KI: Did you have early literary publications?
AE: I published several poems in campus literary magazines and elsewhere. But my main publishing venue was the campus humor magazine, the Penn State Froth. I wrote large parts of each issue — satire, parody, crude campus humor, cartoons. I also wrote two novels — both unpublished — at about that time. The first was a combination tribute to and parody of the Beat Movement — I had been much impressed by Kerouac’s On the Road and The Dharma Bums. I was intrigued by Kerouac but didn’t believe in totally spontaneous writing — and it turns out that Kerouac didn’t either, though he pretended that was what he was doing. My second novel was a comedy of campus political intrigues, featuring the rebellious editor of a campus humor magazine.
KI: So with these literary and political interests, how did you get involved with psychology research?
AE: I started with rats. The Penn State Psychology Department was heavily behaviorist, really Skinnerian, so my first research assignment as an undergraduate was running a couple of rats in a Skinner box. I found that pretty boring and I thought monkeys would be at least a step up. The first social psychology class I took was taught by C.R. Carpenter, who was the only person who had done any systematic field research on monkey and ape behavior at that time. I joined his last expedition to Barro Colorado Island in Panama, which primarily did a census of howler monkeys to find out the social composition in each group. I also observed the incidence of intra-group aggression among these monkeys for a senior honors thesis.
KI: How did this lead to your joining the Milgram studies on obedience to authority?
AE: After about two weeks of studying howler monkeys, I knew that I didn’t want to make that my life work. By the time I got to Yale Graduate School I wanted to do research on human beings. I started there with Irving Janis, who was doing research on persuasion and the effects of role-playing on attitude change. I knew something about that because I had been a competitive debater in high school and college for seven years. In debate you don’t necessarily just advocate a position you believe in – sometimes you are assigned to a different position and have to support it regardless of your own beliefs. It’s a very good background for research, for identifying the important issues and outlining the main points and supportive evidence.
But Irving Janis was to be away on sabbatical my second year, so I began looking for someone else to work with. Stanley Milgram was a new, young assistant professor at Yale then, very organized, very self-confident. He hired me for the summer when the obedience experiments began. Milgram kept detailed notebooks of everything he was thinking and doing. He was very good at outlining things and developing procedures.
I was very interested in using social psychological research to address major social issues. Obedience to authority certainly was one. It was important at the time in terms of understanding the psychological processes that led to the Holocaust but it was relevant to other social issues as well. This was 1961, when obedience to destructive authority was evident among more than a few U.S. citizens. I had recently written a couple of articles for the Nation magazine about right-wing political activism and I saw connections.
KI: What was your role during the experiments?
AE: I participated in the first few trials and helped develop the procedures for the rest of the obedience research. I prepared the lists of words the subjects were supposed to memorize, recruited subjects on the phone, came to the lab every day, made sure the electrode paste was ready for application, etc. — I was Milgram’s man Friday. Stanley and I both played various roles in the pilot, including each of us being the person giving the orders. But we decided neither of us worked out very well as the Experimenter: I looked too young and Stanley was too short (he was around 5’6” or 5’7”). He wanted somebody who would immediately be perceived as an authority. Usually we both remained behind the two-way mirror, observing and discussing the current subject’s behavior.
KI: Did the obedience research change the tide of research in social psychology?
AE: It did briefly encourage some other researchers to find situations that realistically involved human subjects, rather than the very artificial experiments that most social psychological laboratories were doing then, and are now. But then the controversy developed about ethical issues, and the Feds and the APA established ethical guidelines that made it very difficult to do research even remotely like that.
KI: In retrospect, how do you view your involvement with the studies?
AE: I participated for about a year. It was certainly the most striking study I had been involved with, just in terms of research subjects engaging in what they felt to be a really intense and emotionally involving experience. My main criticism is that Stanley was really not interested in personality variables that might affect people’s behavior; his concern was strictly with situational factors. Irving Janis was clearly both a social and a personality psychologist. Stanley Milgram was purely a social psychologist and I thought he was missing something.
KI: Please tell us more about your advisor, Irving Janis.
AE: He was an unusual psychologist in that he not only did laboratory studies of attitude change but was very interested in major political issues — this was when he wrote the book on groupthink (published as Victims of Groupthink, 1972). He also was trained as a psychoanalyst. He really started me on psychobiography by assigning our first-year graduate seminar to read Freud’s key chapter on the Irma dream and asking us to come up with additional interpretations besides Freud’s. Irving responded very positively to the ones I came up with, based on material in Freud’s letters. That eventually resulted in my first psychobiographical paper, on Freud and the Irma dream and Martha Freud’s sixth pregnancy.
Irving was a good role model — quite eclectic in his methodology as well as theoretically He was strongly Freudian but also utilized ego psychoanalysis, Erik Erikson and David Rappaport. One of his major books was Psychological Stress (1958), which discussed the effects of stress in social psychological terms but used as an extended example a woman he had treated in full-scale psychoanalysis while she was developing cancer. This was a combination of nomothetic and very idiographic research, so I was determined to do the same thing.
KI: After completing your doctorate, you taught at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas before coming to UC Davis in 1967?
AE: Yes, starting in Fall 1964 – John Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas less than a year earlier. I figured it would give me the opportunity to do sustained research on the personalities of extreme right-wingers. This was the time that the John Birch Society was very active. It was also then that Richard Hofstadter published his book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), which impressed me. I assembled a sample of extreme right-wingers, people who had written really extremist letters to Dallas newspapers, and a sample of moderates. I made certain statistical comparisons among those samples but I became most interested in how the right-wingers’ individual autobiographical experiences motivated them to take these extreme positions.
I was moving toward psychobiography with this interest in right-wingers as individuals rather than as an average. In my first real book, Social Psychology and Social Relevance (1972), I included a good deal of material about personality variables interacting with social psychological variables. But when I was hired at UC Davis, it was principally as a laboratory researcher and as a questionnaire researcher. I was still working both on studies of attitude change and on political beliefs and thought Davis would be a good place to do research on left-wingers. The students at Berkeley had started the Free Speech Movement by that time and the anti-Vietnam War movement was getting strong there, and Davis is only 60 miles from Berkeley. But I found it nearly as hard to find real left-wingers in Davis as in Dallas. So I gave up that line of research and at about the same time I stopped doing lab research on attitude change. I decided there were plenty of other psychologists who were more eager to do lab research than I was and they were probably better at it, whereas I was one of a very few psychologists who seemed genuinely enthusiastic about psychobiography.
KI: What is your primary intellectual affiliation now?
AE: I’m primarily a personality psychologist but I still think I have some things to say about social psychology.
KI: Please describe your theoretical biases and methodologies in doing psychobiography.
AE: I try to find the theoretical orientation most appropriate to the subject I am studying, since I don’t feel that any single theoretical perspective fits everyone. If I’m looking at what appears to be midlife crisis issues, I’ll go to Erikson or Daniel Levinson. If I see a lot of sexual symbolism in a subject’s dreams or writings, I’ll see if Freud’s ideas about such things still work (as they do in looking at Freud himself!). I’ve written about my preferred methods at some length in Uncovering Lives. As with theoretical approaches, I try whatever works in amassing useful data about a subject.
KI: How do you respond to critics who claim that psychobiography is hopelessly subjective and therefore extremely prone to bias?
AE: By doing as good a job as I can of avoiding bias in my own work and using care to collect the sorts of biographical data that will persuade even the critics that there is something useful in a psychobiographical approach.
KI: What are your thoughts on Freudian psychobiography?
AE: With regard to Freud’s own psychobiographical work, I regard him as the field’s great pioneer who broke the trail for the rest of us but who failed to overcome his own biases. See my “Freud as Leonardo,” Chapter 3 in Uncovering Lives, for a detailed discussion of what he did wrong in his longest psychobiography — especially in terms of his projective identification with Leonardo. With regard to others’ work in Freudian psychobiography, sometimes it works and sometimes they should have chosen another approach.
KI: How do you assess the work of psychologists who use quantitative methods to study lives, such as Dean Keith Simonton and Frank Sulloway?
AE: Dean and Frank have both come up with interesting findings, which psychobiographers may find useful in providing a broader context for individual case studies. Frank provides a number of mini-psychobiographies in Born to Rebel that sometimes support and sometimes contradict his overall quantitative findings. He doesn’t seem to realize that his conclusions about children finding individual psychological “niches” in the family are more Freudian than Darwinian.
KI: What has been your experience in working with the dreams or daydreams of your subjects?
AE: I don’t usually have dreams or daydreams to work with, but I do look for imaginative constructions when I can find them. In examining the psychobiographical foundations of B. F. Skinner’s theories, for instance, I found it very useful to have his novel Walden Two available to analyze, rather than having to work only with his intentionally non-self-revealing technical books and articles.
KI: Is psychobiography of women subjects, or “feminist psychobiography,” the same as or different than that of male subjects?
AE: “Feminist psychobiography” and “psychobiography of women subjects” are not the same thing. Blanche Wiesen Cook’s psychobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (1992) is explicitly feminist, pushing Roosevelt herself into a particular feminist pattern that the data don’t fully support. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “stealth psychobiography” (my term) of Eleanor Roosevelt in No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (1994) is not feminist in any dogmatic sense, but is attentive to issues in her life that a female biographer would probably be more sensitive to than a male biographer would be, or might overlook or misinterpret.
KI: Can autobiography or memoirs be psychobiography?
AE: An autobiography or memoir can certainly be sufficiently attentive to psychological questions and answers to qualify it as psychobiography. Erikson’s essay, “Autobiographical Notes on the Identity Crises,” on his own personal history in relation to identity issues is as psychobiographical as one can get. Likewise Henry Murray’s essay in A History of Psychology in Autobiography (Vol. 5, 1967). Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963) is psychobiographical in part, though I think Jung would have done better in his self-analysis if he’d used something besides Jungian theory.
KI: How are we to evaluate the quality of psychobiographies?
AE: By closely tracking the research methods used, by careful assessment of the quality of the biographical evidence, by evaluating the psychobiographer’s evident biases and relating them to his/her interpretations of the data, and by considering whether another theoretical approach to the subject would explain more or be more coherent.
KI: Please list the five people who you think have made the greatest contribution, in rank order, to psychobiography, with a brief “why” for each one.
AE: Freud, of course, as the granddaddy of us all — arguing in favor of a comprehensive approach to the subject’s psychology, rather than just doing pathography; offering at least a hint of appropriate methodological models; and providing an imperfect model, but a model nonetheless, of how to apply a broad theoretical approach to a specific subject (for example, Leonardo).
Erikson, of course — refining Freud’s approach; giving us very detailed examples of applying theory and method in two major cases and a number of shorter ones; giving much attention to issues of countertransference; and providing us with a developmental schema which among other things reminds us of certain key questions that we need to ask about our subjects at different parts of their life cycles.
Beyond Freud and Erikson come a number of people who have made significant contributions but whom I couldn’t rank in any sensible way: Henry Murray, William McKinley “Mac” Runyan, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jim Anderson, Irv Alexander, Peter Loewenberg, etc.
KI: What special considerations are necessary in doing cross-cultural psychobiography, such as on Saddam Hussein?
AE: In my chapter on George Bush Senior and Saddam (in Uncovering Lives), I enunciate some of those considerations. Erik Erikson discussed them at greater length in Gandhi’s Truth. Basically, they add up to the need to be very careful when you’re studying somebody from a different culture — whether it’s a subculture within our own country, or a culture as different from ours as that in Iraq or India or Renaissance Italy.
KI: Please name five exemplary psychobiographies, with a brief reason for each one.
AE: Erikson’s Young Man Luther and Gandhi’s Truth are exemplary for their biographical detail, theoretical perspectives, and displays of methodological thoughtfulness. I know that several of the specialists on Luther have complained about one or another detail in Young Man Luther, but I haven’t seen them producing a more psychologically sophisticated or persuasive account of his basic motives and his development in young adulthood. Likewise for specialists on Gandhi — Erikson did as good a job as anyone could expect in approaching Gandhi from a non-Indian’s perspective and at the same time offered us a fascinating comparison of Gandhi’s “truths” with Freud’s “truths.” Both books are full of explicit and implicit methodological lessons for would-be psychobiographers.
Freud’s Leonardo book, for providing later psychobiographers with an array of prescriptive and proscriptive guidelines as detailed in my Uncovering Lives. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on Lyndon Johnson, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976), still one of the best political psychobiographies, for her use of inside information about LBJ and for her attention to the ways in which personality interacts with specific political roles. Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time, for insightful analyses of the great husband-and-wife team, even though Goodwin avoids citing the sources of her theoretical approach. John Bowlby’s book on Darwin, Charles Darwin: A Biography (1990), for the restraint he shows in suggesting connections between Darwin’s psychosomatic problems and Darwin’s theories, while advancing a persuasive explanation of how those psychosomatic problems developed and were eventually resolved.
KI: Which are a couple of purported psychobiographies that are examples of how not to do psychobiography?
AE: Gail Sheehy’s multiple analyses of Presidential candidates in the magazine Vanity Fair, partly collected in her book Character: America’s Search for Leadership (1988); and various Freud-bashing books trying to invalidate Freud’s theories by offering wild analyses of his personality.
KI: What training and experience has been most helpful in your doing psychobiographical work?
AE: Getting a fair amount of clinical training during graduate school was helpful, but I think it would have been less helpful if I hadn’t also been getting trained in the more “scientific” approaches to research in personality and social psychology. Training in classical and contemporary psychoanalytic theory, in grad school and later, has been quite useful. In addition, I have undergone psychoanalytic psychotherapy from two wise analysts. I wouldn’t say that it changed my outlook on society, but I think it gave me greater self-insight (a useful thing for a psychobiographer to develop as much as possible) and more self-confidence that my perceptions of others’ behaviors and personalities were more often than not reasonably veridical.
KI: What are you working on now?
AE: I’m working to finish a couple of book-length projects: a psychobiographical novel on C.G. Jung and a full-scale biography of Paul Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith. The Jung novel, focusing on his six-month journey across East Africa and down the Nile in 1925-1926, grew out of my research on Jung’s autobiography and is an effort to get at some psychological insights about him that might be more elusive via straightforward psychobiography. The book on Linebarger is my first and maybe last effort at doing a life history essentially from scratch. Previous biographical work on him was quite limited in length and scope, so I’ve had to work from the ground up to establish the broad outlines as well as the details and subtleties of his life. (I do want to give credit to John J. Pierce, who did the first biographical work on Linebarger in a fanzine article and a book introduction.) Linebarger is a fascinating subject for several reasons. His book, Psychological Warfare (1948), was a pioneering effort and is still well worth reading. His scholarly studies of China only partly conceal a strongly ambivalent personal relationship with the Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek regimes. His work for U.S. Army Intelligence and the CIA, mostly unpublished and unavailable for public view, was given alternative expression in several pre-James Bond spy novels (only one of which was ever published, Atomsk) that are a good deal more psychologically complex than anything Ian Fleming ever wrote. Perhaps most significantly, his science fiction under the pseudonym “Cordwainer Smith” remains strongly influential on many contemporary science fiction writers (for example, Ursula Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad) for its psychological strangeness as well as its literary style. In addition, Linebarger may have been the patient in the famous case history by Robert Lindner, “The Jet-Propelled Couch” in The Fifty-Minute Hour. So there has been plenty to sustain my interest over two decades of intermittent but often intensive research on Linebarger’s life and work.
KI: What is the status of the book-length psychobiography of Elvis Presley that you are/were collaborating with Bruce Heller on?
AE: Elvis is on the back burner right now, but I move him to a front burner again every time I visit Graceland. Maybe that book will get finished after Cordwainer.
Kate Isaacson is a doctoral student in personality and social psychology with Alan Elms at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests are in psychobiographical theory and methodology, literary psychobiography, life course theories of personality, and the personality and social correlates of addiction. She is currently the research coordinator for the Northern California Methamphetamine Study (National Institute of Health/UC Davis Medical Center), and is working on a psychobiographical study of Tennessee Williams, a study of recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and a longitudinal study of creative productivity in Pulitzer Prize winners and nominees. [Actually, as of the 2010 date of this starcraving.com website posting, Dr. Isaacson has become a faculty member at Holy Names University in Oakland, CA.]