Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA.
J Pers. 2023 Feb;91(1):247-261. doi: 10.1111/jopy.12738. Epub 2022 Jun 26.
In the first 100 days of his U.S. presidency, Joe Biden sought to comfort Americans who had lost loved ones to the pandemic and to initiate a surprisingly progressive policy agenda. I interpret these two cardinal features of his early presidency in terms of two traumatic losses in Biden's personal life, contextualizing the argument within a 3-tiered model of personality.
This psychobiography of a single case mainly follows an inductive, grounded-theory approach that aims to find patterns in the data that both explain a life and link to evidence-based constructs in psychological science.
As Biden understands his own life story, the deaths of his wife and daughter in 1972 and first-born adult son in 2015 forged an empathic sensibility that enables him to connect deeply with other Americans through shared grief and pain. These two traumatic events also inform the uniquely conciliatory approach he followed to instigate social change.
The first 100 days of the Biden presidency provide a striking example of how a particular person's life history comes to meet the broader historical moment. The findings have implications for how personality researchers think about redemptive life stories and the nature of late-life narrative identity.
在其担任美国总统的头 100 天中，乔·拜登试图安慰因疫情而失去亲人的美国人，并启动一项令人惊讶的进步政策议程。我从拜登个人生活中的两个创伤性损失的角度来解释他早期总统任期的这两个主要特点，并在一个三重人格模型的背景下提出该论点。
对单个案例的这种心理传记主要采用归纳式、扎根理论的方法，旨在从数据中找到既能解释一个人的一生又能与心理科学中的循证结构相联系的模式。
拜登认为自己的人生故事是，1972 年他的妻子和女儿以及 2015 年他的长子去世，这两件事形成了一种同理心，使他能够通过共同的悲伤和痛苦与其他美国人建立深厚的联系。这两个创伤性事件也为他采取独特的和解方式来推动社会变革提供了信息。
拜登总统任期的头 100 天提供了一个引人注目的例子，说明一个特定的人的生活经历如何与更广泛的历史时刻相遇。这些发现对人格研究人员如何思考救赎人生故事和晚年叙事认同的本质具有启示意义。
