Psychohistory is a transdisciplinary field of knowledge that represents an amalgam of psychology, history, psychoanalysis, political psychology, anthropology, ethnology, and related social sciences, art, and humanities. Psychohistorians examine the "why's" of history, utilizing the bottom-up approach rather than starting with psychological theories. They combine the insights of psychodynamic psychology, especially psychoanalysis, with the research methodology of the social sciences and humanities, to understand the emotional origin of the behavior of individuals, groups and nations, past and present. Psychohistorians are interested in examining one's childhood, personality, family dynamics, as well as dreams, overcoming adversity, creativity, group and political affiliations. No single consensus definition exists within the field. Jacques Szaluta describes it as "the application of psychology, in its broadest sense, or psychoanalysis in a specific sense, to the study of the past." Henry Lawton characterizes it as "the interdisciplinary study of why man has acted as he has in history, prominently utilizing psychoanalytic principles," and notes that the field "is essentially interpretive" rather than narrative. Peter Loewenberg describes it as combining "historical analysis with social science models, humanistic sensibility, and psychodynamic theory and clinical insights to create a fuller, more rounded view of life in the past." Bruce Mazlish defines it as "the application of psychoanalytic concepts and theories to historical data and the re-examination of the psychoanalytic concepts and data in the light of historical methods." Scholars differ on whether psychohistory constitutes a distinct academic discipline or an interpretive method within conventional historical research. In his seminal book, "The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors," Paul Elovitz, a "big tent" psychohistorian and "an Eriksonian participant-observer and scholar of this valuable movement" provided his assessment of the field of psychohistory through the lens of his experiences since the late 1960's. He stated that "Thoughtful people do psychohistory whether or not they realize it. Psychological assumptions underly any assessment - or even comment about - history, human interaction, and society. We humans want to know why things happen. These psychological assumptions underlying these speculations are seldom well thought out or developed. Thus, all historians do a type of psychohistory without realizing it."
History of the Field of Psychohistory
Precursors (1910s–1950s) The application of psychoanalysis to historical figures began with Sigmund Freud and his circle. Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910) was the first extended psychoanalytic study of a historical personality, and members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society produced dozens of short studies of figures such as Napoleon, Shakespeare, Wagner, and Dante during the 1910s, many published in the journal Imago. In 1913, the American Reformation historian Preserved Smith published "Luther's Early Development in the Light of Psycho-Analysis", an early example of a professional historian applying psychoanalytic concepts to a historical subject. The New York neurologist and psychoanalyst L. Pierce Clark, who wrote psychoanalytic studies of figures including Lincoln and Napoleon, was using the terms "psychohistory" and "psychobiography" by the 1920s. During the Second World War, the Office of Strategic Services commissioned the psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer to prepare a psychological study of Adolf Hitler, which predicted Hitler's suicide; it was later published as The Mind of Adolf Hitler (1972). After the war, the Central Intelligence Agency employed analysts to assess the psychology of foreign leaders.
Emergence as a field (1957–1969) In his 1957 presidential address to the American Historical Association, the Harvard diplomatic historian William L. Langer called the application of "dynamic psychology" to history the profession's "next assignment", arguing that the common-sense psychological interpretations of past historians were inadequate compared with psychodynamic knowledge. The following year, the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson published Young Man Luther (1958), a study of Martin Luther that drew the attention of much of the academic community to the possibility of psychoanalytically informed history. Later, in 1969, Erik Erikson published Gandhi's Truth: On The Origins of Militant Nonviolence. This book includes a substantial section on Gandhi's childhood, up to the time when he went to London to study law, which helps to understand Gandhi's character and the roots of his life's philosophy. Academic historians and social scientists produced a wave of psychologically informed studies in the 1960s, most of them psychobiographies, including Bruce Mazlish's edited Psychoanalysis and History (1963), Rudolph Binion's Frau Lou: Nietzsche's Wayward Disciple (1968), Frank Manuel's A Portrait of Sir Isaac Newton (1968), and Arthur Mitzman's The Iron Cage (1969), a study of Max Weber. The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton published Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1968), which won the National Book Award; and in 1966, he and Erik H. Erikson founded the Group for the Study of Psychohistorical Process, an annual multi-day seminar held at his home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. This group was sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and met until 2015, becoming the longest-running psychohistorical group.
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