Concept
Psychohistory
The application of psychoanalytic understanding to history and to the lives of historical figures, reading individual development and collective events in the light of each other. Freud's study of Leonardo da Vinci was an early instance; Erikson's books on Luther and Gandhi gave the field its model and much of its method, and the name became current in the 1960s and 1970s.
- Key works
- 3
developed by
- Erik Erikson 1958 Young Man Luther (1958) and Gandhi's Truth (1969) set the pattern for psychohistory, reading a leader's personal crises together with the historical crises of their time.