ABSTRACT
Psychohistory is the application of psychoanalytical principles to understanding historical figures and their actions. Its origins lie in Freud’s famous study of Leonardo da Vinci in 1910. Insofar as it concerns itself to mental phenomena it would seem to have a close connection to the cognitive historical approach.
Thus the question we ask in this chapter is: What light can psychohistory shed on creative phenomena—especially creative lives—that cognitive history cannot (does not) do?
To address this question we draw on more contemporary writings of psychoanalysts, psychohistorians and historians influenced by psychoanalysis, in particular Erik Erikson but also Peter Gay, Cushing Strout, Peter Lowenberg and Gerard Izenberg, to delineate the general nature of the psychohistorian’s craft. Based on this understanding we address the question posed at the head of this chapter. I draw on two of the protagonists who appear in this book, the computer pioneer Maurice Wilks and, more extensively, physicist/plant biophysicist Jagadis Bose, as case studies to illustrate when cognitive history and psychohistory are respectively, appropriate explanatory tools. In some situations they offer complementary approaches to an understanding of an artificer’s particular act of production or to hi creative life.
