“Partial” Stories: Exegesis, Eisegesis, and the Tale of Two “Failed” Biographies

This chapter examines two “failed” biographies, understood in the sense that they are currently unpublished as well as through their intent to query the biographical project, both of which are concerned with the history of psychiatry. Using the intertwined concepts of exegesis and eisegesis and outlining the links between psychological projection and interpretative acts, the piece explores the ways in which experimental biographies might foreground to readers the acts of interpretation that go into their construction, rather than eliding them, and demonstrates some of the ways in which biographical subjects might thereby be more explicitly revealed to be “partial” representations of the actual historical personage.