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“Human character changed in 1910,” Virginia Woolf mused.20 Her insights were often blinding if whimsical, and in this case there is plenty of solid evidence to support her, if we translate her aphorism into some such statement as, “From about 1900 to 1913 a climax came in the problem of the European artist-intellectual's relationship to the public order.” We may further surmise that a crisis which first affected the sensitive minority later spread to wider social circles and constitutes the chief “psychohistorical” or “psychosocial” dilemma of modern times. My own profession is that of historian, but of course psychology and history, assisted by such as Erik Erikson, have drawn closer together under the rubric of psychohistory; and it seems clear that those concerned with treating individual mental aberration can hardly divorce such cases from the surrounding social and cultural world in which the patient lives, moves, and has his being. If human character did change in 1910, the psychiatrist ought to know it. And for an understanding of why and how it changed, the historian surely needs the help of the psychologist.
1910 was also a critical year for psychoanalysis. It was the year in which the International Psychoanalytical Association was founded and the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse began publication; for our purposes the publication then of Freud's Leonardo da Vinci was a significant pioneer psychohistory exercise. The Freud-Jung partnership, destined to break up in disharmony three years later, was in full swing, and the two founding fathers felt the intoxication of battle; amid violent attacks and cries of outrage, they sensed that “the ferment is at work”5 and the corner was being turned leading to the