Psychohistory’s False Start

Two premises together define psychohistory: that human history all reduces to human doings and that the reasons for human doings are largely unconscious. Because it was psychoanalysis that first accessed the unconscious underside of human doings, psychohistory began as applied psychoanalysis. This was a false start. For one thing, it discouraged aspirant psychohistorians from learning the why of historic behavior from the historic record itself and encouraged them instead to read into the historic record what psychoanalysts had learned about patients. For another, even the richest of historic records are short on childhood experience, the stock-in-trade of psychoanalysis, so that psychoanalysis could not even be well applied to history. For a third, a concern with pathology inevitably brushed off from psychoanalysis onto fledgling psychohistory, which should rather have come to terms with normalcy as its first order of business. But above all, the bulk of history is human interaction on a large scale, whereas the stuff of psychoanalysis is individual experience, including individual experience in groups.