Book Celebration Virtual Conference
William McKinley Runyan, Alan C Elms, & Ramsay Bell Breslin (Editors)
Oxford University Press
October 3, 2026 (Saturday), 12-3pm EDT/NYC
Attendance is Free, but RSVP is Required
WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT?
Examining Lives: Self-Reflections in Psychobiography, published by Oxford University Press, is an interdisciplinary collection by members of the Bay Area Psychobiography Group, which has been active since 1992. The volume brings together scholars and clinicians from psychology, history, literature, and the arts to examine the lives of notable figures whose personal histories shaped their creative and public work.
The subjects include filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock; musicians Glenn Gould and Elvis Presley; writers Flannery O’Connor and C. S. Lewis; political activist Emma Goldman; and artists Mark Rothko, Ferdinand Hodler, and Stephen De Staebler. Each chapter is psychobiographical in that it combines biographical inquiry with psychological interpretation.
What distinguishes Examining Lives is its sustained attention not only to the person being studied, but also to the relationship between biographer and subject. The contributors reflect on what drew them toward—or at times repelled them from—the people they chose to study, how their own histories and emotional responses entered the work, and how encounters with their subjects affected their thinking and their lives.
Organized into three sections — Death and Dying; Identity and Family; and Self and Subject —the book explores mourning, healing, identity, rage, humor, immersion, perversion, and creative inhibition, among other themes. In doing so, it raises a central question for psychobiography: what happens when the biographer steps into the frame? Rather than treating biography as a detached reconstruction of another person’s life, Examining Lives presents it as an encounter between two human beings — one being studied and one doing the studying — in which rigorous inquiry and self-reflection can deepen one another.
During this book celebration, contributors Ramsay Bell Breslin, Marilyn Fabe, Claire Kahane, and Stephen Walrod will present and discuss their work included in the volume.
https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197849316.001.0001
Online ISBN: 9780197849316; Print ISBN: 9780199342556
AUTHORS AND THEIR SUBJECTS:
THE TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction — by Stephen T. Walrod
This chapter introduces Examining Lives as an interdisciplinary compilation of self-reflective psychobiographic papers written by members of the San Francisco Bay Area Psychobiography Group. Themes of loss, trauma, mourning, rage and perversion become motivating forces driving the effort to remember, reconnect, make reparation, and ultimately to heal.
Part I. Death & Dying
Chapter 1. Terminating Mark Rothko: Biography is Mourning in Reverse — by James E. B. Breslin
The chapter describes what it was like for its author “to live with, and then to end, to lose, to terminate, this intense emotional and imaginative involvement” with his biographical subject — the abstract-expressionist painter, Mark Rothko (1903-1970).
Chapter 2.The Psychology of Mourning in the Sculpture of Stephen De Staebler — by Ramsay Bell Breslin
The chapter describes how, in a dual act of mourning between mother and child, De Staebler’s sculptures enact a gradual separation of the living from the dead, in defiance of the forces of gravity that continually threaten to topple them.
Chapter 3.“The Intensity of Seeing for the Last Time”: Ferdinand Hodler and the Death of Valentine Godé-Darel — by Stephen T. Walrod
This chapter interweaves the psychobiography of the painter Ferdinand Hodler, including an analysis of the scores of paintings and drawings he made of his dying lover, Valentine Godé-Darel, with an account of the night the author’s wife, Anne Walrod, died unexpectedly of a viral infection of her heart.
Part II. Identity & Family
Chapter 4. C.S. Lewis and Shadowlands: Reflections on Grief through Biography, Film and Personal Experience — by Madelon Sprengnether
“C.S. Lewis and Shadowlands” examines the impact of Lewis’s mother’s death when Louis was nine. The chapter interweaves Lewis’s story with that of the author, who suffered the childhood loss of her father. The author’s mourning provides a parallel and counterpoint to that of Lewis.
Chapter 5. Shooting to Kill: Hitchcock’s Heroines and the Perverse Scenario — by Marilyn Fabe
This chapter traces Alfred Hitchcock’s violent filmic treatment of women, in particular his heroines, to his childhood experiences with a depressed and controlling mother.
Chapter 6. From Rage to Re-vision: A Backward Glance at the Relation Between Personal Conflict and Professional Writing — by Claire Kahane
The chapter shows how unconscious rage against parental demands and the cultural constraints of gender shaped O’Connor’s fiction and triggered the author’s own hysterical writing block.
Part III. Self and Object
Chapter 7.Nearer My Subject to Thee: Thirty Plus Years of a Documentary Editor’s Engagement with Emma Goldman — by Candace Falk
“Nearer My Subject to Thee,” written by the Founding Director of the Emma Goldman Papers at U.C. Berkeley, questions the impact and unconscious motivation of devoting one’s life to collecting and shaping the written legacy of the life of another.
Chapter 8. Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius — by Peter F. Ostwald
The chapter relates the memorable first encounter of a distinguished psychiatrist, Peter Ostwald, and a famous pianist, Glenn Gould. Although they met on a concert stage in San Francisco, they came from opposite worlds.
Chapter 9.My Seventy Years with Elvis Presley: A Preface to a Psychobiography — by Alan C. Elms
This chapter began as a preface to a book on Elvis Presley. In it, the author intended to give his readers a perspective on his psychobiographical approach by tracking his own personal history as an Elvis fan. For reasons unclear to him at the time, he struggled writing the preface and put it aside for over thirty years.
Chapter 10.Conclusion: Studying Lives in Different Disciplinary Subcultures: A Psychologist’s Personal Perspective — by William McKinley Runyan
This Conclusion reviews the history of the San Francisco Bay Area Psychobiography Group from the personal perspective of a psychology professor who has spent his career advocating for the study of lives within the social sciences.
CRITICAL ACCLAIM
“Examining Lives: Self-Reflections in Psychobiography is a testament to the inseparability of self-knowledge and knowledge of others. By interweaving stories of the experiences of authors with the lives of their creative subjects, Examining Lives offers a unique fabric of engagingly written, empathically informed essays, redefining rather than obscuring biographical objectivity. This book speaks to the interests of many disciplines and to readers seeking radical honesty in life writing. A wonderful achievement!” ~ Murray M. Schwartz, Professor of English, Emerson College; coeditor, Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays; coauthor of The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus
“Tantalizing conundrums of life and work bubble up in the pages of this beautifully written volume, which takes readers on voyages of exploration through beguiling realms of psychobiography. Threads of each author’s personal life are braided into essays on artists, novelists, and filmmakers. We revel first in a stunning essay on Mark Rothko, the luminous abstract expressionist painter, then settle in for further mesmerizing adventures sparked by memoir, reflection, and poignant confession.” ~ Ellen Handler Spitz, senior lecturer of humanities, Yale University, author of Art and Psyche, Image and Insight, and Magritte’s Labyrinth.
“Not all book titles fulfill their stated goal. Examining Lives: Self-Reflections in Psychobiography does, brilliantly. Melding the personal and the psychological, the book illuminates the complex relationship between the psychobiographer and the biographical subject. The interpreter is always a part of the interpretation, a truth that has long been denied. Anyone interested in learning about others’ lives will find this book deeply fulfilling.” ~ Jeffrey Berman, Professor of English, University at Albany, State University of New York, author of Psychoanalytic Memoirs and Freudians and Schadenfreudians: Loving and Hating Psychoanalysis.
“In this intellectually stimulating and deeply personal volume, psychobiographers consider the intense relationships they have formed, sometimes unwittingly, with the subjects of their studies. What happens, for example, when Alfred Hitchcock or Elvis Presley takes up residence in your psyche? How do you react as a biographer when a devastating trauma your subject experienced (or a transgression they committed) strikes an emotional chord in your own life? This book’s beautifully crafted essays illustrate the manifold ways that efforts to understand another person may often double as explorations of the self.” ~ Dan P. McAdams, Professor of Psychology and Human Development, Northwestern University, and author of George W. Bush and the Redemptive Dream: A Psychological Portrait and The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning
“This is a remarkably rich and evocative collection of psychobiographical essays by masters of the study of lives. Coming from a range of disciplines and addressing a range of biographical subjects, the essays share both an immersion in the subjects’ lives and a self-reflexive focus. In their wisdom and openness, the essays reveal psychological truths about both subject and author and, if the reader is equally open, about the reader as well.” ~ Amy P. Demorest, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Amherst College, author of Psychology’s Grand Theorists: How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas.
ORDER THIS BOOK BY USING THESE LINKS:
UK:https://global.oup.com/academic/product/examining-lives-9780199342556?q=9780199342556&cc=gb&lang=en
US:https://global.oup.com/academic/product/examining-lives-9780199342556?q=9780199342556&cc=us&lang=en
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
William McKinley Runyan’s Life Histories and Psychobiography (Oxford University Press, 1982) was the first major study of psychobiography and related psychological case studies. He edited Psychology and Historical Interpretation (Oxford, 1988), and in 1986 received the Henry A. Murray Award for his contributions to the study of individual lives and whole persons. He received a PhD from Harvard in 1975. From 1979 to 2010, he was a professor in the School of Social Welfare and affiliate professor of psychology, University of California, Berkeley. He became Professor Emeritus in 2010.
Alan C. Elms was a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Davis. His Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (Oxford, 1994) established him as one of the major figures in the field of psychobiography. The Handbook of Psychobiography, edited by W. T. Schultz (Oxford, 2005), includes four chapters by Elms. He also wrote Personality in Politics (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976) and Social Psychology and Social Relevance (Little, Brown, 1972). He received his PhD from Yale in 1965 and the Henry A. Murray Award in 1987 for his contributions to the study of individual lives and whole persons.
Ramsay Bell Breslin, MFA, California College of the Arts (2005), is an art writer, academic editor, and former publisher (Kelsey Street Press). Her essays have appeared in Fort Da, The Threepenny Review, FRAMES, and the East Bay Express.
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James E. B. Breslin (1935–1996) was a professor of English (from 1964) and the acting chairman (from 1994) of the Art Practice Department at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1959 he received an MA in English from the University of North Carolina and in 1964 a PhD from the University of Minnesota. In 1985 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Breslin’s lifelong interest as a scholar lay in twentieth-century American poetry and art. His books include William Carlos Williams: An American Artist (Oxford University Press, 1970); From Modern to Con-temporary, American Poetry 1945–1965 (University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Mark Rothko: A Biography (University of Chicago Press, 1993), which was described at the time by New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer as, “the best biography of an American painter ever written.” Six months after the publication of Mark Rothko: A Biography, the New York Times Book Review featured the essay that appears as chapter one of Examining Lives.
Ramsay Bell Breslin is an art writer, poet, academic editor, and former publisher (Kelsey Street Press). She holds a degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA in Writing from the California College of the Arts. A former student of painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, her self-portrait was featured on the cover of Women’s Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her published writing includes catalogue essays and introductions to artists’ books, including Squeak Carn-wath: Lists, Observations, and Counting (Chronicle Books, 1996). Her review essays have appeared in the Threepenny Review, the East Bay Express, and in FRAMES Dig-ital Companion (2024). Chapter two of Examining Lives originally appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Fort Da. She is currently writing an experimental biography of the sculptor Stephen De Staebler.
Alan C. Elms (1938–2025) was a professor emeritus of psychology at the Uni-versity of California, Davis. He received his PhD from Yale University and has published three books: Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (Oxford University Press, 1994), Personality in Politics (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), and Social Psychology and Social Relevance (Little, Brown, 1972). He contributed four chapters to the Handbook of Psychobiography, edited by William Todd Schultz (Oxford University Press, 2005). His most recent projects were a study of the so-called “Freud Wars” and an examination of the life of Paul
M. A. Linebarger, who was a leading science fiction writer (using the pseudonym Cordwainer Smith) and a psychological warfare expert. Elms is a recipient of the American Psychological Association’s Henry A. Murray Award for his contributions to the study of individual lives and whole persons, an award then sponsored by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in conjunction with the Society for Personology. His website is https://elms.faculty.ucdavis.edu.
Marilyn Fabe is senior lecturer emerita in the Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She taught courses in film history, film theory, the avant-garde film, the musical, film noir, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Chaplin, Woody Allen, and Howard Hawks. Her book Closely Watched Films (Uni-versity of California Press, 2004; 10th Anniversary revised edition, 2014) focuses on the accomplishments of fourteen film directors from D.W. Griffith to Spike Lee, illus-trating each director’s contribution to narrative film art. Her research interests focus on the relation between the life and art of film directors, and she has published psy-chobiographical essays on Charles Chaplin, Orson Welles, Maya Deren, and Alfred Hitchcock. She is currently working on a psychobiography of Woody Allen.
Candace Falk is editor and director of the Emma Goldman Papers, University of California, Berkeley. She holds an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago and a PhD in political theory from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her book Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman (1984, 1990, 1999) was selected among the New York Times’ best biographies of the year. With her associate editors at the EGP, Falk amassed and published 22,000 documents for Emma Goldman: A Com-prehensive Microfilm Edition (1991–1993), along with the Kanner-Award-winning compendium volume, Emma Goldman: A Guide to her Life and Documentary Sources, named “Best Bibliographical Work in Women’s History” (1995). In 2014 Falk received the Society of American Archivists’ Hammer Award for “increasing public awareness of an archival collection of significance.” Emma Goldman: A Doc-umentary History of the American Years, 1890–1919, edited by Falk et al., concludes with volume four, Emma Goldman: Democracy Disarmed 1917–1919, (forthcom-ing, Stanford University Press). Chapter seven of Examining Lives, for which Falk received a Guggenheim Fellowship, represents the first in an anticipated series of reflections on her years of documentary-biographical engagement with Emma Goldman.
Mark Freeman is a professor of psychology and distinguished professor of ethics and society in the Department of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. His books include Rewriting the Self: History, Mem-ory, Narrative (Routledge, 1993); Finding the Muse: A Sociopsychological Inquiry into the Conditions of Artistic Creativity (Cambridge, 1994); Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward (Oxford, 2010); The Priority of the Other: Thinking and Living Beyond the Self (Oxford, 2014); Do I Look at You with Love? Reimag-ining the Story of Dementia (2021); The Use and Abuse of Stories: New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics, coedited volume with Hanna Meretoja (Oxford, 2023). Toward the Psychological Humanities: A Modest Manifesto for the Future of Psychol-ogy (Routledge, 2024). Winner of the 2010 Theodore R. Sarbin Award in the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology and the Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Psychological Foundation, he also serves as editor for the Oxford University Press series “Explorations in Narrative Psychology,” of which this book is a part.
Claire Kahane is a professor emerita of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, a research associate in the English Department at the Univer-sity of California at Berkeley, and a graduate and community member of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. She has written essays on modern American and British fiction, the Gothic in literature, Holocaust trauma and representa-tion, and, most recently, on perversion and narrative structure in the fictions of Ian McEwan. Her books include The M/Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psycho-analytic Interpretation, coedited with Madelon Sprengnether and Shirley Garner (NCROL, 1985); In Dora’s Case, coedited with Charles Bernheimer (Columbia University Press, 1985, reprinted in 1990); Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narra-tive and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850–1915 (John Hopkins University Press, 1995); and Nine Lives: My Risky Road from Fifties Rebel to Feminist Critic (Brandylane, 2025).
Peter F. Ostwald (1928–1996), a native of Berlin, left Nazi-occupied Germany in 1937, at age nine. Upon arriving in San Francisco, speaking not a word of English, he soon overcame this impediment, graduating from Lowell High School at six-teen; the University of California’s Medical School at twenty-two; and, after serving in the US Army Medical Corps in Germany, completed his psychiatric residency at New York Hospital’s Payne Whitney Clinic. In 1956, he joined the staff of the University of California, San Francisco’s Langley Porter Institute. An accomplished violinist, he gave numerous “lecture recitals” linking music and psychiatry, accom-panied by Paul Hersh or Lise Deschamps on the piano. During a twelve-year battle with cancer, he wrote three award-winning psychobiographies: Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius (Northeastern, 1985); Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap Into Madness (Robson Books, 1991); and Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius (W.W. Norton & Co., 1997). In 1986, Ostwald founded the first Health Program for Performing Artists in the Western United States, and in 1991, was honored with the prestigious J. Elliot Royer Award for distinguished service in psychiatry.
William McKinley Runyan is the author of Life Histories and Psychobiography (Oxford University Press, 1982), which analyzes methodological issues in case stud-ies, idiographic methods, and psychobiography. He edited and wrote three chapters of Psychology and Historical Interpretation (Oxford 1988), which critically evalu-ates the use of psychology in historical studies. In the Handbook of Psychobiography (Oxford University Press, 2005), he conceptualized three developing traditions in his chapter, “Evolving Conceptions of Psychobiography and the Study of Lives: Encounters with Psychoanalysis, Personality Psychology, and Historical Science. With Gardner Lindzey, he coedited A History of Psychology in Autobiography (Vol. 9, 2007). In the Handbook of the Psychology of Science (Springer, 2013), he contributed a chapter on “Psychobiography and the Psychology of Science: Encounters with Psy-chology, Philosophy and Statistics.” Runyan received a PhD in clinical psychology and public practice from Harvard University in 1975 and from 1979 to 2010 was a professor in the School of Social Welfare and an affiliate professor, Psychology
Department, University of California, Berkeley. He became professor emeritus and professor of the Graduate School in 2010. Runyan is a recipient of the Henry A. Mur-ray Award for his contributions to the study of individual lives and whole persons, an award then sponsored by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in conjunction with the Society for Personology.
Madelon Sprengnether is regents professor emerita of the University of Minnesota, where she taught literature and creative writing in the Department of English. She has published widely in the field of feminism and psychoanalysis, most notably as coeditor of The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (Cornell University Press, 1985), and as author of The Spectral Mother: Freud, Fem-inism, and Psychoanalysis (Cornell University Press, 1990). She has also published three memoirs: Rivers, Stories, Houses, Dreams (New Rivers Press, 1983), Crying at the Movies (Graywolf Press, 2002), and Great River Road: Memoir and Memory (New Rivers Press, 2015), in addition to three collections of poems: The Normal Heart (New Rivers Press, 1981), The Angel of Duluth (White Pine Press, 2006), and Near Solstice: Prose Poems (Holy Cow! Press, 2015). Her most recent book is Mourning Freud (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). She is currently working on an unpublished memoir titled “The Kissing Disease: Tales of Love, Sex, and Intimacy from the 1960s through the 1990s.”
Stephen T. Walrod received a AB in history from Princeton University, an MA in teaching from Reed College, and a PhD in psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology. His interest in psychobiography began with his doctoral dissertation on the Viennese expressionist artist, Egon Schiele. He has taught at the California School of Professional Psychology and the San Francisco Art Institute and lectured internationally on the topics of psychoanalysis and art and Freud’s Vienna. In 1992 Walrod formed the Bay Area Psychobiography Group. In 2000 his paper on the Swiss symbolist Ferdinand Hodler was awarded the Daniel Bilmes Prize for the best paper on the topic of loss by a member of the CSPP community. He has been a clinical psychologist in private practice in Oakland, California, since 1980.