While psychoanalysis was once a heresy in the eyes of historians,
University of Hawaii professor Stannard (The Puritan Way of Death)
appears the heretic now. For him, all psychohistory is
fundamentally flawed; rather than attack individual works,
therefore, he argues along thematic lines. He avers, first, that
psychoanalysis has not demonstrated its ability as a therapeutic
technique, so there is no validity to the basic presumption of
psychohistory, that psychoanalysis works. After that, for Stannard,
everything falls apart. Presuming that the theory is correct,
psychohistorians tend to make up facts where there are none - often
by a false logic that posits if B exists, then A must necessarily
have occurred. Examples abound, as in Erikson's Young Man Luther,
where he attributes to Luther the experience of "roaring" in a
monastery in his youth because it seems to explain later events,
while the experience itself appears to have no foundation.
Ignorance of cultural context - a context which is irrelevant for
the psychohistorian - also leads to presumptions that individual
actions are psychoanalytically significant where they may be only
culturally standard - as in Freud's emphasis on Leonardo's freeing
of caged birds, which Stannard says was a general practice thought
to bring good luck. One failing of Stannard's attack is his own
underestimation of the importance of interpretation in historical
understanding, since he adopts a simple "scientific" approach to
"facts." (Another, for some, will be his total identification of
practice with theory.) More relevant to strict psychohistorical
studies of individuals rather than to those which deal with whole
societies, Stannard's assault will undoubtedly heat up the going
debate. (Kirkus Reviews)
Studies the burgeoning field of psychohistory - from Freud, its
primogenitor, to its present-day academic practitioners - and
argues that little, if any, psychohistory is good history. The
author points out the pitfalls, sheer irrationality, and ultimately
a historical nature of this mode of historical inquiry.
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