Since history's foundation as a university discipline in the last half of the nineteenth century, professional historians have often looked to other fields for new perspectives. Branching out from their discipline's original focus on political history, historians of the twentieth century studied the methods and findings of economics, sociology, and anthropology and developed economic history, social history, and cultural history, all of them powerful models for historical research and writing. One social science never quite made the list: psychology. Despite the cultural prestige of Sigmund Freud, psychological history or psychohistory failed to establish a comparable beachhead on the disciplinary front. When many historians turned, as they did between the 1970s and the 1990s, away from the social sciences toward the more humanistic branches of learning – literature and languages, art history, rhetoric and semiotics – psychology still attracted little notice. This essay is devoted to explaining why historians largely ignored psychology in their search for new approaches and how this neglect is a problem for historical thought. The essay concludes with a consideration of recent hopeful signs of new interest in incorporating psychology into historical research and writing.
What difference would it make if historians used something other than a common-sense or folk psychology in their research and writing? It would be foolish to argue that historical scholarship has suffered some irreparable harm because most historians have overlooked the problem of the psyche or the self. Rich and illuminating research has been carried out without an explicit model of the self and without an agenda for studying historical transformations in personhood. Moreover, some historians have tried to pinpoint important changes in the ideas and practices of selfhood. In recent years, cultural historians have investigated attitudes toward gender, private life, sexuality and death, all of them critical components of individual identity and personal experience. Yet this research still leaves many fundamental questions unanswered. Can human motivation be entirely explained in social and cultural terms? Is the individual self just the name for a place where social and cultural changes work themselves out on the level of individual bodies? What do we imagine is happening inside that entity we call the self? Is individualism – the belief in the virtue of an autonomous self – a modern, Western notion and if so, how did it develop? And how can historians interested in these issues avoid falling into the trap of characterizing earlier periods and non-Western cultures as emotionally infantile? Historians can hardly be expected to provide answers to these questions if they do not pose the questions in the first place. In short, a more psychologically attuned historical discipline would pay more heed to changes over time in personhood and thereby give analytical depth to one of the most frequently invoked but rarely examined categories in historical scholarship.