Friday, October 17, 2008

Top 5: Armchair shrinks to the famous

In the therapeutic era, it's fun to confine world-historical events to the realm of psychology — to effectively reduce biography to psychobiography. Oliver Stone's biopic of President Bush, "W.," which opens today, fixates on the idea that its subject's alcoholism, fecklessness and inferiority complex vis-a-vis his father predestined real-world calamities like the Iraq War. Like we said — fun. But an ultimately incomplete and all-too-subjective method of historical inquiry.

1. Peter O. Whitmer — What made Elvis Presley, well, Elvis? According to 1996's "The Inner Elvis," it was the king of rock's status as a "twinless twin." His taste in stage-wear, his favorite colors, his fusion of "black" and "white" music: It all stemmed from the fact that Mr. Presley had a stillborn twin brother and the resulting psychological duality.

2. C.A. Tripp — The late psychologist and one-time sex researcher tried gamely in his posthumously published manuscript "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln" to prove that the 16th president was gay. Historians roundly dismissed the theory as ill-founded, but it did have the perhaps saving grace of being well-intentioned: Mr. Tripp maintained that Lincoln's profound sense of empathy derived from the pain of suppressing his own desires.

3. Rick Perlstein — In what is, to be sure, an otherwise exhaustively researched political history, author Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" tries to make too much hay of Richard Nixon's simmering class resentment, supposedly stoked by his fraternity days at Whittier College, where he founded a scrappy rival clan, the Orthogonians, in response to the elite and snooty Franklins.

4. Philip Norman — John Lennon provided much fodder for psychobiographical speculations about his mother complex. There was the loving "White Album" ode "Julia" and the anguished solo-era "Mother," for example. In his recent "John Lennon: The Life," Mr. Norman runs scandalously wild, claiming the Beatle legend actually fantasized about sleeping with his mother.

5. Norman Mailer — Psychobiographical theories of the origin of Adolf Hitler's evil are too numerous to catalogue here. We'll just go with the most recent: the late Mr. Mailer's rendering, in the novel "The Castle in the Forest," of Hitler's family life as fantasia of incest, lots of masturbation and, as one critic put it, a mother who paid "overly fastidious attention to his bowel movements."