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Traditionally, the study of history has had fixed boundaries and focal
points — periods, countries, dramatic events, and great leaders. It also has had
clear and firm notions of scholarly procedure: how one inquires into a
historical problem, how one presents and documents one’s findings, what
constitutes admissible and adequate proof.
Anyone who has followed recent historical literature can testify to the
revolution that is taking place in historical studies. The currently fashionable
subjects come directly from the sociology catalog: childhood, work, leisure. The
new subjects are accompanied by new methods. Where history once was primarily
narrative, it is now entirely analytic. The old questions “What happened?” and
“How did it happen?” have given way to the question “Why did it happen?”
Prominent among the methods used to answer the question “Why” is psychoanalysis,
and its use has given rise to psychohistory.
Psychohistory does not merely use psychological explanations in historical
contexts. Historians have always used such explanations when they were
appropriate and when there was sufficient evidence for them. But this pragmatic
use of psychology is not what psychohistorians intend. They are committed, not
just to psychology in general, but to Freudian psychoanalysis. This commitment
precludes a commitment to history as historians have always understood it.
Psychohistory derives its “facts” not from history, the detailed records of
events and their consequences, but from psychoanalysis of the individuals who
made history, and deduces its theories not from this or that instance in their
lives, but from a view of human nature that transcends history. It denies the
basic criterion of historical evidence: that evidence be publicly accessible to,
and therefore assessable by, all historians. And it violates the basic tenet of
historical method: that historians be alert to the negative instances that would
refute their theses. Psychohistorians, convinced of the absolute rightness of
their own theories, are also convinced that theirs is the “deepest” explanation
of any event, that other explanations fall short of the truth.
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