Goldman, you may recall, wrote a highly unflattering book about Elvis Presley a few years ago that included a diagnosis of the rock star as a split personality and a delusional paranoid. Elms says Goldman is a good example of an author who tried to employ a psychobiographical technique and failed utterly. Goldman attempted to augment his Elvis biography with a serious psychological analysis when all he really did was shove this famous person into a pathological pigeonhole, said Elms.
Elms says bad psychobiographers are usually scornful of alternatives to the theories they choose.
Good psychobiographers are usually open to several interpretations and give detailed evidence for choosing whatever theory they back. Bad would be Fawn Brodie on Richard Nixon or Nancy Clinch on the Kennedy family. Elms say a good psychobiography can rival the very best traditional biographies in the insights it offers in fact, the best biographies today include psychobiographical elements. Elms uses examples of his own work taking closer looks at Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner, Isaac Asimov, L. Frank Baum, Vladimir Nabokov, Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Saddam Hussein and Henry Kissinger. He includes a wonderful how to chapter literally, how to gather the clues, published and unpublished, that when painstakingly assembled will form a portrait of the person you want to write about.