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One of the elements that makes American democracy work is the fact that we tend to lead hyphenated existences. We are African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, and so on. Part of our cultural identities is signified by the word on the left side of the hyphen. It is our own business, as long as there is no public question raised about our political allegiance to the American side of the hyphen. Those of us who are primarily trained as historians or as psychoanalysts, but who are interested in bringing the insights derived from psychoanalysis into the historical field, lead an additional hyphenated existence. We have been referred to as psycho-historians and psycho-biographers. The psycho part of the hyphenated term is the one that causes the most trouble. For it is often said that there are few historians who have the psychoanalytic background necessary to either engage in the practice of psycho-history/biography, or to judge the results of such inquiries.
Psychoanalysts are given the same treatment—it is said they simply do not know enough history, or what passes for the professional study of history. They are unfamiliar, it is said, with what constitutes acceptable evidence and with how to support claims of causality.
This is the same argument that historians and lawyers get into, and why one of the first things fledgling graduate students in history used to be asked to read was Wigmore's Principles of Judicial Proof (2nd edition, 1931), or some other similar law school text on evidence. In the end, proof is in the weight of all the evidentiary facts that support a given proposition.
Writing history is not the same thing as arguing a case in court. Perhaps that is why—during their education—lawyers are hardly ever asked to read Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft (1953), or some similar history text designed to