For quite a few years, my departmental research website consisted of just a few pictures and brief comments about several of my favorite research projects. (My thanks to Dr. Richard Coss for helping me get those pictures online.) As a contribution to the historical record, here is the total content of that early website, with a couple of small updates:
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Fig. 1. Self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci -- or is it Leonardo's portrait of his father? Nobody knows. Was Freud's book on Leonardo a psychological portrait of Leonardo -- or a self-portrait of Freud? See Chapter 3 of Alan Elms's book Uncovering Lives (Oxford University Press, 1994) for some answers to that question.
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Fig. 2. Title page of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," first edition. See Chapter 10 of Elms, Uncovering Lives, for a psychological analysis of the creator of Oz, L. Frank Baum.
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Fig. 3. Obedience started here: Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Yale University. Here Stanley Milgram ran the classic studies of obedience to authority; Alan Elms was his research assistant. See the Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 51, No. 3, 1995, pp. 21-31 for Elms's first-hand description of the early studies: "Obedience in Retrospect."
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Fig. 4. Elms at Graceland. Alan Elms is writing a book-length psychobiography/psychohistory of Elvis and his fans, in collaboration with clinical psychologist Bruce Heller. A preliminary paper by Heller & Elms, "Elvis Presley: Character and Charisma," was published in Elvis + Marilyn: 2 x Immortal (ed. Geri DePaoli), Rizzoli International, 1994. More recently, Elms & Heller contributed a chapter on the psychology of Elvis's frequent errors in performing the song, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?", to the Handbook of Psychobiography (ed. Wm. Todd Schultz), Oxford University Press, 2005.
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Copyright © 1997-2008 by Alan C. Elms, All Rights Reserved.
Revised: September 15, 2008.
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A C Elms Personality & Psychobiography Research