Abstract: Psychobiography is a discipline which uses the psychological theories and methods to study the life story of extraordinary people. It could be viewed as a sub-discipline of personality psychology from the developmental histrory of psychobiography. The paper introduced the development process of international psychobiography for the past century, dividing it into three periods, that is, the period of case study(1910s-1970s), the period of the preliminary foundation of discipline（or the period of theoretical exploration of discipline,1980-2005）, and the period of disciplinary development(2005-present). The first psychobiographical work—“Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood”was written by Freud in 1910. ever since then, over the past 7 decades, the psychobiographical work almost had used the psychoanalytic theories to interprete the life story of extraordinary people, which is the reason why it is also called the period of psychoanalytic psychobiography. Because of the problems such as the pathological tendency of the studies, reconstruction of the history of subject’s childhood, and utterly relying on the early year experience to interprete the personality and behavior of the subjects. the psychobiographical research were widely criticized. The first theoretical book of psychobiography was published in 1982, and several other books were published later, which try to solve the above criticism from a theorical perspective. “the handbook of psychobiography” which was edited by Schultz and was published in 2005 became the hallmark of the foundation of the psychobiography, and indicates that the psychobiographical studies have entered the period of disciplinary development. In the 21st century, the development of psychobiography has become a worldwide phenomenon. Apart from the U.S.A, China and South Africa are currently the two fastest growing countries in the field of psychobiography. A lot of fruitful achievements in the theoretical research of psychobiography were made. About the data management methods, several new methods were proposed , for example, “principal identifiers of salience”(Alexander，1988，1990), “prototypical scene” （Schultz，2002，2005） and “life story model of identity” （McAdams，1996，2001）; About interpretive models or research approaches, Crosby et al.(1981) proposed two models: Causal interpretive model and coherent-whole interpretive model. Runyan(1988) proposed “the model of eight Component Processes”. Some researchers of psychobiography put forward the assessment criteria of psychobiographical work quality（Runyan，1988；Schultz，2005）. About the psychobiographical case studies, three subfields had been formed, namely, the pscychobiographical study of political figures(political psychobiography) which mainly explores the relationship among the personality of politicians, their life story and their political behavior. The psychobiographical study of psychologists, it mainly explores the relationship between the theories which psychologists proposed and their life stories. The pscychobiographical study of artists and writers, it mainly explores the relationship between their life stories and their literary or artistic works. Moreover, a new field called comparative psychobiography has gradually come into being. In China, studying in field of the psychobiography should avoid pathological tendency and pure qualitative research with artistic form, should strengthen application of psychobiography, especially, the application in the fields of psychological counselling, education and human resources management, and should embark on the psychobiographical study of Chinese outstanding psychologists.

Key words: Psychobiography, Life story, Life narrative

摘要： 心理传记学是采用心理学的理论和方法来研究非凡人物生命故事的一门学问。文章对百余年来国际心理传记学的发展状况进行了回顾，将其发展分为三个阶段：案例研究阶段、理论探索阶段和学科发展阶段。该学科在传主资料的筛选与处理方法、解释模型等理论研究方面已获得了较丰富的成果，并已形成三个稳定的研究领域。在我国开展心理传记学研究，要避免人物研究的病理化倾向和艺术式的纯质化道路，并加强应用探讨以及着手进行中国杰出心理学家的心理传记研究。

关键词: 心理传记学, 生命故事, 生命叙事