I have taught psychohistory to undergraduates at Albion College more years than not from 1977 to the present. Also, in 1980 I taught an undergraduate psychohistory course at UCLA. At Albion there has always been interest in the course from students in a wide variety of disciplines. It is certainly not for everyone since not only is its subject matter relatively arcane for undergraduates, it is an upper-division seminar that requires for admission at least junior standing or the permission of the instructor. It is also the only course in the History Department almost completely devoted to historiography. As such, the course for the most part attracts the most intellectually curious and capable among our students. It is also a course that marks a departure from the great bulk of material and perspective offered by the Department of Psychology at Albion, which is predictably nomothetic in its approach. The stance of most of my colleagues inside and outside the Department of History toward psychohistory and psychoanalysis is largely one of benign neglect. On the other hand, one of my fellow historians used my book of readings, Psycho/history (1987), for an honors seminar in the social sciences and I have been invited by a colleague in the Psychology Department to discuss my research on psychotherapy in the Third Reich to an infrequently offered History of Psychology course. The psychohistory seminar has also since 1995 met the college gender category requirement through its critical analysis of sexuality, primarily by means of Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering (1978). It took a bit of doing to achieve this status, because there was some concern among the members of the curriculum committee that the material would not be critical enough of essentialist assumptions about female sexuality in Freudian thought. But, in fact, recent psychoanalytic studies of gender in particular are quite exemplary in terms of their careful distinctions between biology and social construction — not to mention “destiny.”
Geoffrey Cocks (Wed,) studied this question.