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Psycho-history is a developing branch of study. It attracts a wide variety of practitioners, the best of whom are those who are prepared to work imaginatively in both the parent disciplines and careful to document their interpretations and evaluations in a scholarly manner. As senior lecturer in history and international affairs at the Institute of Education, London University, and as a protagonist for many years of the adaptation of archetypal theory to both the study of history and the study of how to teach history, Dr Henderson is in a strong position to demonstrate what a working psycho-historian is.
Mythology, poetry, music, novels, biographies, memoirs, criticism, as well as the works of Jung, are all areas of human creativity with which he shows himself to be familiar: he brings out the family likenesses to be discerned by a thinker who is tracing—as Erich Neumann did—the evolution of consciousness. Sophisticated history as the interpretation of events (as compared with crude history as the record of events) is obviously akin to interpretative and synthetic analysis as it is practised in the consulting room. Interpretative history is the attempt to find out what ‘really’ happened, and of that work there is no end. Therein lie the greatest dangers of psycho-history: discursiveness, verbiage.
James Henderson divides his book into two parts. In the first he discusses and illustrates the themes discernible to a Jungian educationalist in his search for how honestly to help young people to develop their full potentialities; they are the themes of origin,