My Psychoanalytic Psychobiography and Methodology

Abstract

While sharing a common humanness, all people, cultures, and ethnicities are special and different. If Joseph Henrich is correct, as he asserts in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020), then the West is the weirdest society. While Elovitz finds weird to be an unscientific term, the West certainly has been a change agent that has broken with so many traditions and run roughshod over its cultures and ethnicities, as well as nature itself. Yet its focus on analysis, democracy, individualism, material prosperity, and so forth provides many of the conditions for psychobiographical and other psychological work. Humans need major cultural exchanges around our planet, including through the in-depth study of the lives of people in all cultures. People need to know each other’s psychology at the micro and macro levels. Elovitz believes that it will be very good if non-Western peoples can have the benefits of democracy, education, material well-being, etc., while maintaining their specialness and enriching knowledge.