pathographer

Noun

pathographer (plural pathographers)

1. A biographer who focuses on the negative aspects of their subject's life.
   • 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.1956, Eduard Hitschmann, Sydney G. Margolin, Great Men: Psychoanlytic Studies, page 63
   • The pathographer, by contrast, seeks to discredit the very idea of greatness1994, American scholar - Volume 63, page 312
2. One who writes about the lived experience of illness or pathology.
   • 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...1992, Meridian: The La Trobe University English Review
   • 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, The Arizona Quarterly - Volume 55, Issues 3-4
3. One who interprets art in terms of the psychological issues of the artist.
   • 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.1985, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Art: PPA., page 18
   • 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.1993, Emanuel Berman, William E. Butler, Essential Papers on Literature and Psychoanalysis, page 250