Since 1910, when Freud attributed Leonardo da Vinci's brilliance in part to his repressed sexuality, biographers have tried to decipher the psyches of the gifted and famous. Did Elvis have a Christ complex? Was Winston Churchill bipolar?
"Trying to understand someone by giving them a diagnosis is virtually worthless," says psychologist William Todd Schultz, who argues that a word simply names a behavior without adding new meaning to it. As editor of the forthcoming Handbook of Psychobiography (Oxford University Press) and professor at Pacific University in Oregon, Schultz takes an academic approach to the analysis of historical figures' inner lives. His book, the first introductory text on the practice of psychobiography, explains how to use psychological theory and research to shed new light on the achievements of complex people, instead of just giving them a label.
