The perspective of psychotherapy is something new and assumed. A gross and harmful distortion of modern biographical writing

I have read and continue to read a lot of biographies; both formal biographies, and more journalistic accounts of people's character, actions, and lives. 

And since the mid-20th century most biographies I have encountered - especially the worst ones, and the worst aspects of even the better biographies - adopt the assumptions of psychotherapy even when writing about older and the pre-modern people. 

Yet; I am confident that people of the past were not motivated therapeutically in the way that modern people are motivated. 

That is, I don't believe that past people lived with the implicit (often explicit) intention of reducing their (more or less severe, more or less long-term) psychological state of dysphoria (i.e. feeling bad/ adverse/ un-pleasant in some way). 

Nor did past people have the over-arching life-purpose of "making themselves feel better"; by their life-choices and behaviours. 

We moderns usually do have such a perspective on life - but it was not always thus. 

Furthermore; the psychotherapy perspective in biography (i.e. in the intent of understanding people) usually traces dysphoria to either past experiences (e.g. childhood or early-life relationships, traumatic events, disappointments etc.); or to disease. 

Whereas it would be more accurate to recognize that much of our character is inherited. 

Yet, heredity was the first-line explanation for human behaviour for (probably) thousands of years - i.e. through most of recorded history. 

I mean: to explain a person's behaviour, the usual thing in earlier times was to discuss what had been inherited from parents and other ancestors - including typical racial characteristics.  

The consequences of these anachronistic distortions is profound; a gross failure to understand what it is to be human. We moderns populate history with versions of our own unusual modern consciousness. 

This has many adverse effects; including eliminating from consideration a whole world of group consciousness, of people who lived embedded-in a psychological world derived from their ancestors. 

Eliminating many centuries in which religion was such a powerful motivator that it was often primary - and overcame considerations of personal happiness or suffering. 

And - because psychology and psychotherapy are products of the atheism and materialism of modernity. 

Past experiences and diseases are typically explained in wholly materialistic terms; and when heredity is considered, it is materialist - only from the modern and narrow perspective of genetics. 

Thereby eliminating a world in which "the spiritual" was pervasive; and relationships naturally and spontaneously extended to include the dead; spiritual beings such as angels, demons, fairies and ghosts; and eliminating, also, what used to be profoundly life-shaping experiences of direct relationships with the divine.    

Thus modern biographical writing is yet another of the many ways in which - by our assumptions - we paint ourselves into a corner of alienation and soullessness; whereby we conceptualize ourselves as nothing more or other than material entities produced-by and acted-upon by material influences... In a world that has always been like this, with the implication that our condition is inescapable.