pathographer

English

Etymology

patho- +‎ -grapher

Noun

pathographer (plural pathographers)

1. One who writes a pathography.
   1. A biographer who focuses on the negative aspects of their subject's life.
      • 1956, Eduard Hitschmann, Sydney G. Margolin, Great Men: Psychoanlytic Studies, page 63:

        Thus it becomes understandable that this champion of compassion is described as an obstinate, violent, distrustful man, quick to condemn; even by his pathographer, Moebius, who loved him personally.

      • 1994, American scholar - Volume 63, page 312:

        The pathographer, by contrast, seeks to discredit the very idea of greatness

      • 2018, Ilany Kogan, Canvas of Change: Analysis Through the Prism of Creativity:

        He maintains that, in contrast to "biographers who are fixated upon their heroes", the pathographer has outgrown the omnipotent, infantile wish to idealise his subject and can proceed to unearth the truth.

   2. One who writes about the lived experience of illness or pathology.
      • 1992, Meridian: The La Trobe University English Review:

        The pathographer does not just record his or her suffering and patienthood: the pathographer forces that medical understanding of the body as a biological entity into conflict with another understanding, or, to put it in another way, assays to read that biomedical knowledge through another form of knowledge.

      • 1999, The Arizona Quarterly - Volume 55, Issues 3-4:

        The contingent and complex nature of illness, disability, and pain makes the unified self a metaphysical delusion, yet one that the pathographer apparently cannot relinquish if he or she is to recover some modicum of normative ontological constancy.

      • 1999, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography, page 91:

        The report of the pathographer confirms the theories of the scholar. So Peter Noll, diagnosed as having cancer of the bladder, defends his decision to reject surgical intervention: "I don't want to get caught in the surgical-urological-radiological machine because then I'll lose my freedom piecemeal, my will will be broken as hope diminishes, and I'll end up one way or another in the well-known death room that everyone skirts."

      • 2017, Martina Zimmermann, The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing, page 24:

        The challenge of all illness experience may then perhaps be said to confront the pathographer of Alzheimer's with particular intensity.

2. One who interprets art in terms of the psychological issues of the artist.
   • 1985, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Art: PPA., page 18:

     When a pathographer attempts to discuss intention, he must not neglect this aspect of intention, that is to say, the needs, dictates, strictures, and seductions of the work of art itself—its form, its own internal structure.

   • 1993, Emanuel Berman, William E. Butler, Essential Papers on Literature and Psychoanalysis, page 250:

     In this sense the anti-intentionalist argument must be taken seriously by the pathographer: his interpretations must bear the test of a second moment of aesthetic experience or else he cannot claim, whatever else he may be doing, to be making critical statements about works of art.

   • 1999, Chopin Studies: Frederic Chopin Society, page 114:

     The first pathographer to oppose the falsification of this truth was Willms (13) who in 1934 drew attention to pertinent data in Chopin's correspondence.