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Jacques Szaluta's Psychohistory: Theory and Practrice is a textbook, written in textbook style, and aspiring to cover the territory of its subject clearly and thoroughly. It opens with a Webster's model definition that sets the tone: “psychohistory is the application of psychology, in its broadest sense, of psychoanalysis in a specific sense, to the study of the past, of history.” So, to explore the field, we need to know about what is being applied, psychoanalysis, and about the ways in which it has been applied, and we need to know about that to which psychoanalysis has been applied, history, and the areas and types of history involved. Psychohistory covers this two-part agenda item by item.
On the psychoanalysis side, Szaluta offers a brief, workmanlike survey of Freud's main concepts and a look at the way in which Freud himself explored historical topics in works like Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents. These pages may be of help to graduate students in history, but psychoanalysts will find them boring. Later Szaluta looks at the work of the most prominent psychoanalytic practitioner of psychohistory in the medium of