The Michael Eric Dyson Reader by Michael Eric Dyson

Author:Michael Eric Dyson [MICHAEL ERIC DYSON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Civitas Books
Published: 2012-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

PSYCHOBIOGRAPHY AND THE FORCES OF HISTORY

If the task of biography is to help readers understand human action, the purpose of psychobiography is to probe the relationship between psychic motivation, personal behavior, and social activity in explaining human achievement and failure. The project to connect psychology and biography grows out of a well-established quest to merge various schools of psychological theory with other intellectual disciplines, resulting in ethnopsychiatry, psychohistory, social psychology, and psychoanalytic approaches to philosophy.43

Behind the turn toward psychology and social theory by biographers is a desire to take advantage of the insight yielded from attempts to correlate or synthesize the largely incompatible worlds of psychoanalysis and Marxism carved out by Freud and Marx and their unwieldy legion of advocates and interpreters. If one argues, however, as Richard Lichtman does, that “the structure of the two theories makes them ultimate rivals,” then, as he concedes, “priorities must be established.”44 In his analysis of the integration of psychoanalysis into Marxist theory, Lichtman argues that “working through the limitations of Freud’s view makes its very significant insights available for incorporation into an expanded Marxist theory.”45

Psychobiographers have acknowledged the intellectual difficulties to which Lichtman points while using Marxist or Freudian theory (and sometimes both) to locate and illumine gnarled areas of human experience. For instance, Erik Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence, one of psychobiography’s foundational works, weds critical analysis of its subject’s cultural and intellectual roots to imaginative reflections on the sources of Gandhi’s motivation, sacrifice, and spiritual achievement.46

As they bring together social and psychological theory in their research, psychobiographers often rupture the rules that separate academic disciplines. Then again, if the psychobiographer is ruled by rigid presuppositions and is insensitive to the subject of study, nothing can prevent the results from being fatally flat. Two recent psychobiographies of Malcolm X reveal that genre’s virtues and vices.

Eugene Victor Wolfenstein’s The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution is a work of considerable intellectual imagination and rigorous theoretical insight.47 It takes measure of the energies that created Malcolm and the demons that drove him. Wolfenstein assesses Malcolm’s accomplishments through a theoretical lens as noteworthy for its startling clarity about Malcolm the individual as for its wide-angled view of the field of forces with which Malcolm contended during his childhood and mature career.

Wolfenstein uses an elaborate conceptual machinery to examine how racism falsifies “the consciousness of the racially oppressed,” and how racially oppressed individuals struggle to “free themselves from both the falsification of their consciousness and the racist domination of their practical activity.”48 For Wolfenstein’s purpose, neither a psychoanalytic nor a Marxist theory alone could yield adequate insight because Freudianism “provides no foundation for the analysis of interests, be they individual or collective,” and Marxism “provides no foundation for the analysis of desires.” Therefore, a “unifying concept of human nature was required.”49

Wolfenstein’s psychobiography is especially helpful because it combines several compelling features: a historical analysis of the black (nationalist) revolutionary struggle, an insightful biographical analysis of Malcolm X’s life,

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