Name Leon Clark | Died 1933 | |
Books Lincoln, Clinical Studies in Epilepsy | ||
Leon Pierce Clark (sometimes L. Pierce Clark) (1870 – 3 December 1933) was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He was the president of the American Psychopathological Association (APPA) during 1923 and 1924.
His pioneering work in psychobiography was published during the last four years of his life and was way ahead of his time. In 1929 Clark published Napoleon: Self-Destroyed, the first book-size psychoanalytic study of Napoleon Bonaparte. In the last year of his life he published Lincoln: A Psycho-biography, another early work in this field. Clark fought some of the heated battles of the American psychiatrists against the American neurologists that were common in the first part of the twentieth century. Clark's reputation suffered when he was found to have plagiarized most of "Napoleon Self-Destroyed." Clark also was criticized for misunderstanding what Freud meant by what Clark referred to as "narcism."