In his 1960 essay “Beyond the Bounds of the Basic Rule”, the American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut considered the discipline of psychoanalytic biography. This was a practice indulged by Freud himself, in essays on Leonardo da Vinci (1910) and Dostoevsky (1928), and was prevalent ever afterwards.
There were long-held doubts among practising analysts about this approach, Kohut explained in his essay, regarding its methods and the validity of its findings. But the subject acquired an unlikely topical prominence four years later, in 1964, when the US magazine Fact asked a panel of psychiatrists whether the Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater was fit to be president.
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