ABSTRACT
WHY a psychohistorical study of leadership? What does it add to so-called pure historical (i.e., nonpsychohistorical) studies of the subject? We must not take the answer for granted. A look at the work of, say, John Maynard Keynes or Edmund Wilson, gives one pause. In his Economic Consequences of Peace, for example, Keynes offers a brilliant sketch of Woodrow Wilson, which anticipates much of the insight of Alexander and Juliette George's classic Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House and does so by what we can designate as "literary" means. Edmund Wilson, in Patriotic Gore, goes even further, and paints large-scale portraits of a Lincoln, a Harriet Beecher Stowe, a Justice Holmes, a General Ulysses Grant, which are filled with psychological insights, though embedded in general matter, in a general fashion. 1
It is not enough to say that John Maynard Keynes and Edmund Wilson were "influenced" by Freud. We must simply concede that their studies are psychologically revealing, although not formally psychoanalytic or psychohistorical. In their own right they have value. What, then, is the special value of formal or explicit psychohistory, if any? The answer, I believe, is that psychohistory (1) calls our attention systematically to data generally overlooked by most historians; (2) looks at this data in terms of psychological theories, which are connected to clinical data and to continuous, systematic conceptualization, that is, tries in a manner similar to, say, economics, to be more "scientific" than an intuitive or commonsense approach;2 and (3) attempts to establish a body of work and of scholars in this subfield of history that generates, even demands, a continuing, systematic critique of such work. Such a critique will bring the requisite theories to bear on the newly "discovered" data, that is, data either new or newly meaningful to historians.
