You have never read a book like this before.
While you’ve certainly read clinical books and biographies—and maybe even books about biographies—I feel certain that you’ve not read a book that brings to your attention the considerable overlap between these two endeavors.
. . . Urdang, a clinical social worker who has practiced in agencies, in hospitals, and privately, demonstrates her scholarship in both the literary and clinical worlds. As she admits . . ., “I am a clinical social worker and social work educator. I am also hopelessly addicted to biographical writings”
. . . . In bridging these two fields, [she] reminds us of the importance of biographical study . . . as a counterweight to current trends . . . that favor evidence-based, quantitative measures, at the expense of exploring the past, developing empathy, and understanding experiential worlds . . .
Urdang has three goals . . . to emphasize . . . the life course perspective, to explore methodological issues embedded in constructing biographies, and to illuminate the relationship of the biographer to the subject. . . . “All biographies are autobiographies” . . ., Urdang tells us, and she powerfully illustrates this by describing the relationship between author Charlotte Brontë and her biographer Elizabeth Gaskell. . . .
The book is divided into ten chapters that focus primarily on the lives of Charlotte Brontë; Ved Mehta, the contemporary Indian writer . . .; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Frederick Douglass; and Rudyard Kipling. Sprinkled throughout . . . are illuminating stories about . . . the lives and biographies of . . . Edgar Allen Poe, Helen Keller, Erik Erikson, . . . J. D. Salinger, James Joyce, and Oscar Wilde.
The book begins with . . . the history of biographies and autobiographies, . . . a voyage from the Greeks and Romans through the Middle Ages through the Renaissance . . . the Victorian age and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Urdang intersperses her commentary with psychodynamic theory and well chosen clinical vignettes, . . . she convincingly demonstrates that biographers and clinicians must, through empathy and insight, come to have a deep engagement and identification with their subjects. Also, as one learns about the life of another, whether through biographical reading or clinical listening, one must be mindful that a measure of deception and evasion is to be found in all storytelling . . . .
Urdang’s subjects are well-chosen. Their lives are often a mixture of pathos and triumph. . . . Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the immortal Sherlock Holmes, . . . Another chapter is devoted to the life of Frederick Douglass, social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. . . . the complexities of his relationships with his wife, children, and lovers, with a focus on the fate of his ultimately tragic relationship with Ottilie Assing . . . the life of Rudyard Kipling, . . . . Kipling, at age six, was placed with his sister in a private English foster home that Kipling would refer to as the “House of Desolation.” . . . As [she] wisely notes, resilience and vulnerability are not either/or. We find in Kipling’s life the coexistence of both.
Why read biographies? Likely, we obtain the same pleasures as we do from learning about our patients. [Urdang] quotes Conway (1998), “We want to know how the world looks from inside another person’s experience, and when that craving is met by a convincing narrative, we find it deeply satisfying.” . . . Readers of this book, whether clinicians or students of literature, will readily discover such satisfactions, thanks to the erudition and clinical acumen of its author.
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