Integrating psychobiography into professional psychology training: Rationale, benefits, and models.

Abstract

Psychobiography has played a critical role in the history of psychology, yet training in psychobiographical methods is limited in professional psychology programs. The present article reviews the history of psychobiography and highlights the many benefits of incorporating psychobiography into the health service psychology curriculum. Among the benefits of teaching psychobiography are: anchoring students in their professional identity and history; learning diverse theories of psychology in applied and interesting ways; promoting interdisciplinary learning and ethical awareness; enhancing clinical skill development; promoting methodological pluralism; and enhancing multicultural, social justice, and multilingual competence. Diverse models for incorporating psychobiography in the health service psychology curriculum are presented.

Careerography: Application of Psychobiography to Career Development

“…In the last 2 years, major journals internationally, have presented special journal sections or entire issues devoted to psychobiography, including the American Psychologist (Kasser, 2017), the Journal of Psychology in Africa (Fouche, 2015), and the Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology (du Plessis & du Plessis, 2018). Furthermore, the growing integration of psychobiography into the psychology curriculum, particularly in the study of creativity and the gifted, history of psychology, personality theory, and research methods, is also evident (Ponterotto, 2017b; Ponterotto, Reynolds, Morel, & Cheung, 2015). Most recently, Kőváry (2018) demonstrated how effective a psychobiography course was to clinical psychology students in terms of bridging the academic and applied aspects of psychology.…”

“…Developing an adequate interdisciplinary knowledge is challenging for modern-day counselors and psychologists because graduate training is very field-specific, with a rare focus on interdisciplinary studies. Nonetheless, it is incumbent upon the psychobiographer to gain this knowledge in the course of their research (Ponterotto, 2017b).…”

Careerography in Career Counseling Practice, Research, and Training

“…Yet, psychobiographical research, and by extension careerographical research, provides students with the opportunity to engage in multidisciplinary work, bridging investigative journalism and history with a variety of subspecialties within the field of psychology (Ponterotto & Reynolds, 2017). Furthermore, the intensive study of an individual life may be of significant interest to the team due to the subject’s prior achievements, traumas, resiliency factors, and in some cases their sudden downward spiral or ability to affect large societal changes (Ponterotto, 2017b). While psychobiographical research draws heavily from qualitative research methods, students may have the opportunity to learn about and work from various methodologies while performing psychobiographical and careerographical research, including qualitative and historiographic (Elms, 2005; Kőváry, 2018), quantitative (Simonton, 1998), and mixed-methods designs (Ponterotto, 2019; Ponterotto & Reynolds, 2013).…”

“…Psychobiographers have well articulated the benefits of training in psychobiographical research to the professional development of counselors (Ponterotto, 2017a) and psychologists (Kőváry, 2018; Ponterotto, 2017b; Schultz & Lawrence, 2017). Many of these benefits extend to the specialty of careerography, among which include learning diverse career theories in applied and interesting ways; enhancing career counseling skill development through training in in-depth interviewing; learning the importance of sociocultural, historic context in understanding career and work patterns across time; promoting interdisciplinary learning where work and career intersect with history, economics, politics, and religion; promoting methodological pluralism in that various qualitative and quantitative approaches may be used in careerography; and enhancing multicultural, social justice, and multilingual competence as relevant to profiling exceptional work/career lives internationally over time (du Plessis, 2017; Elms, 1994; Kőváry, 2011; Ponterotto, Reynolds, Morel, & Cheung, 2015; Runyan, 1982; Schultz, 2005).…”

“…Beyond the specialization in counseling and counseling psychology, the limited attention that the field of psychology has placed on work, vocation, and career choice and development is an untapped resource. Given that some of Western psychology’s origins were grounded in psychobiography and the study of individual lives (e.g., Erikson, 1958, 1969; Freud, 1910/1957), and considering the increased application of psychobiography in clinical training programs in recent years (Kőváry, 2018; Ponterotto, 2017b; Ponterotto et al, 2015), the present article supports the use of psychobiography, more specifically careerography, in the training of counselors and psychologists.…”