Forced Autobiography?Memoir Writing Competitions and Psychology

The article critically reflects on sources of the biographical method and its relationship with the late -nineteenth-century rapid development of psychology. The author proves that interwar -period memoir writing competitions were a cultural practice closely linked to the fast scientific advances in psychology and medicine. Moreover, she indicates the important role of the emphasis put on everyday writing practices by the psychology and psychiatry at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; this emphasis was to shape new ways of thinking about research methodology in social sciences at the early stage of their development. The article demonstrates that it was precisely personal documents that enabled the development of a specific strategy for studying and understanding one's psyche in the psychology and sociology of the first half of the twentieth century.