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Almost one hundred years ago Freud (1910), in his “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” pioneered the application of psychoanalytic ideas to the understanding of historical personages and events, and thereby set in motion a series of controversies that to some degree still surround the whole idea of “psychohistory.” Half a century later William L. Langer, in his famous 1958 presidential address to the American Historical Association, lamented that little ef fective use had so far been made of psychoanalysis by historians, and declared that this should therefore be their “next assignment.” The laudable purpose of the present volume of essays by a diverse group of authors, drawn from disciplines including psychoanalysis, psychology, history, political science, and international studies, is to assess the status of the use of psychoanalysis in history today, almost another half-century on.
These eighteen relatively brief papers cover a broad range of topics, loosely grouped under six headings: the case for psychobiography; Freud and beyond (covering Freud's own work in the genre and the potential uses of the theories of his followers); the author's journey (on the writer's emotional involvement with his or her topic); psychoanalytic approaches to the study of American presidents; psychoanalytic perspectives on religious history; and psychoanalytic history and culture. Inevitably, the essays are somewhat uneven in quality. They also represent only a sampling of what may currently be going on in the field, rather than offering a coherent perspective on the history of psychohistory itself, something that Bruce Mazlish, in the concluding paper, “The Past and Future of Psychohistory,” admits still remains to be written (p. 252). For a sympathetic and lucid overview of the impact of psychoanalysis on historical studies as a whole, and the resistances it has engendered, the reader would do better to turn to Freud for Historians by Peter Gay (1985), himself one of t