ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud deserves enormous credit for providing the groundwork for applied psychoanalysis, political psychology, psychobiography, and psychohistory. The creator of psychoanalysis’ focus on the individual and insights into the unconscious were essential to these subsequent developments. The personalities and values of leaders and their capacity to improve or harm their society are of great importance and interest. Deceased presidents and leaders have been fair game for amateur historians, especially in retirement, coming from medicine and a variety of other fields, resulting in psychobiographies of most uneven value. Most people learned the term “psychohistory” from Isaac Asimov’s science fiction, in which a psychohistorian could predict the future with mathematical precision. The World War II Office of Strategic Services’ psychological study of Adolf Hitler had correctly predicted his suicide. The absence of much data from Stalinist Russia encouraged psychological interpretations and speculations by scholars such as Geoffrey Gorer and Nathan Leites.
