How should historians employ psychological insight when seeking to understand and analyze their historical subjects? That is the essential question explored in this methodological reflection on the relationship between psychology and biography. To answer it, this paper offers a historical, historiographical, and theoretical analysis of life writing in the history of psychology. It touches down in the genres of autobiography, psychobiography, and cultural history to assess how other historians and psychologists have answered this question. And it offers a more detailed analysis of one particularly useful text, Kerry Buckley's (1989) Mechanical Man, to illuminate specific ways in which historians can simultaneously employ, historicize, and critically analyze the theories of the psychologists they study. Although ostensibly about writing biographies of eminent psychologists, this article speaks to a methodological issue facing any historian contemplating the role psychological theories should play in their historical narratives.

中文翻译：

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心理学家的传记作者：书写心理学史上的生活。

历史学家在寻求理解和分析其历史主题时应如何运用心理洞察力？这是对心理学与传记之间的关系进行这种方法论思考时探索的基本问题。为了回答这个问题，本文提供了心理学史上生活写作的历史，历史学和理论分析。它涉及自传，心理传记和文化历史的类型，以评估其他历史学家和心理学家如何回答此问题。并且它提供了对一个特别有用的文章，凯里·巴克利（Kerry Buckley，1989）的机械人的更详细的分析，以阐明历史学家可以同时采用，历史化和批判地分析他们所研究的心理学家的理论的特定方式。