The New Psychohistory

The Making of Psychohistory is the first volume dedicated to the history of psychohistory, an amalgam of psychology, history, and related social sciences. Dr. Paul Elovitz, a participant since the early days of the organized field, recounts the origins and development of this interdisciplinary area of study, as well as the contributions of influential individuals working within the intersection of historical and psychological thinking and methodologies. This is an essential, thorough reflection on the rich and varied scholarship within psychohistory’s subfields of applied psychoanalysis, political psychology, and psychobiography.

Science fiction-roman.

The enigma of King Herod as a cruel bloodthirsty tyrant on the one hand, and a great builder on the other is discussed in a systematic modern historical and psychological study. It seeks to unravel the contradictory historic mystery of the man and his deeds. After A. Schalit's König Herodes, this study is a new comprehensive, pioneering study on the intriguing personality of Herod, also using the insights of psychology. Herod's mental state reached an acute level, consistent with the DSM-IV diagnosis for "Paranoid Personality Disorder". He grew up with an ambiguous identity and suffered from feelings of inferiority. Haunted by persecutory delusions, he executed almost any suspect of treason, including his wife and three sons. The Hebrew original text was Winner of the Ya'acov Bahat Prize for Non-Fiction Hebrew Literature for 2006.

from the Foreword: Possibly the heartless treatment of children, from the practice of infanticide and abandonment through to the neglect, the rigors of swaddling, the purposeful starving, the beatings, the solitary confinement, and so on, was and is only one aspect of the basic aggressiveness and cruelty of human nature, of the inbred disregard of the rights and feelings of others. Children, being physically unable to resist aggression, were the victims of forces over which they had no control, and they were abused in many imaginable and some almost unimaginable ways by way of expressing conscious or more commonly unconscious motives of their elders... The present volume abounds in evidence of all kinds, from all periods and peoples. The story is monotonously painful, but it is high time that it should be told and that it should be taken into account...

PETER GAY The syllabus of errors rehearsing the offenses of psychohistory looks devastating and seems irrefutable: crimes against the English language, crimes against sdentific procedures, crimes against common sense itself. These objects are real enough, but their contours-and their gravity mysteriously change with the perspective of the critic. From the outside, psychohistorians are to academic history what psychoanalysts are to academic psychology: a monolithic band of fanatics, making the same errors, committing the same offenses, aH in the same way. But seen close up, psychohistorians (just like psychoanalysts) turn out to be a highly differentiated, even a cheerfuHy contentious, lot. Disciples of Hartmann jostle discoverers of Kohut, imperialists claiming the whole domain of the past debate with modest isolationists, orthodox Freudians who insist that psychoanalysis engrosses the arsenal of psychohistorical method find themselves beleaguered by sociological revisionists. The charges that confound some psychohistorians glance off the armor of others. Yet there are three potent objections, aimed at the heart of psy chohistory, however it is conceived, that the psychohistorian ignores at his periI. It would be a convenient, but it is a whoHy unacceptable, defense to dismiss them as forms of resistance. The days are gone when the advocates of psychoanalysis could checkmate reasoned critidsms by psychoanalyzing the critic. To summarize these objections, psychohistory is Utopian, vulgar, ix x FOREWORD and trivial.

Political leaders in Britain are consistently drawn from a class born to be educated away from their families in institutions - elite boarding schools. This has a direct effect on their ability to love, to relate, to make good judgments and to develop the necessary leadership qualities for today's world. In this controversial and highly acclaimed book, the author guides the reader along the elite path through boarding school and Oxbridge to government, unpacking what he calls the Entitlement Illusion. Central to the Illusion is a uniquely British phenomenon, an industrialised process for turning out servants of the Empire that has been unwilling to change with the times. It was deified in the Victorian Rational Man Project and normalised by the British public, who still buy into the trance. Up to date evidence from Neuroscience shows what a poor training for leadership this actually is.

A study of the burgeoning field of psychohistory - from Freud, its primogenitor, to its present-day academic practitioners - this work argues that little, if any, psychohistory is good history. The author systematically points out the pitfalls, sheer irrationality and ultimately ahistorical nature of this mode of historical inquiry.