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This is a volume edited and written by historians and social scientists, drawn from the psychohistory literature over approximately the past 20 years. The editors say they designed it as a book of readings for the teaching of undergraduate psychohistory, and that as such it should 'offer a thorough and balanced introduction' to the field and 'a springboard for discussion of general historiographical issues'. There is little editorial integration.
The subtitle of the book, 'Readings in the Method of Psychology, Psychoanalysis and History', suggests its interest to psychoanalysts. All eighteen of the articles touch to a greater or lesser extent on psychoanalytic topics, reflecting the central place psychoanalytic theory has had in the development of psychohistory. Not all of the writers, however, favour psychoanalytic approaches: five essays are strongly critical, five are noticeably ambivalent and of the eight that are favourable, varying levels of expertise in working with psychoanalytic ideas are apparent. Only one author is a psychoanalyst.
The book is divided into three sections: the first on general epistemological and philosophy of science issues, the second on psychohistorical studies of individuals, the third on the 'psychology of the group' in history. I will take up each of these topics and their principal adherents, in turn.
The book's first essay is the classic by H. J. Eysenck on 'What is wrong with psychoanalysis?' Now 35 years old, this work is a provocative if brief and simplified effort to apply what appears to be an early positivistic version of the methods of experimental science to psychoanalysis. The latter is declared to be 'unscientific' because it does not form clear hypotheses from its basic postulates that can be tested experimentally, and as a result uses 'unreliable' data and comes to over-generalized or tautological conclusions. The basic structure of Eysenck's argument, still very current and vigorously