After more than twenty-five years of calling myself a psychohistorian and writing many books and articles in defense of the discipline, I find myself forced to question deeply whether what I do can be properly categorized with most of my colleagues' work. Three things seem at first blush to put me off: first, because I am not a social scientist I find the constant effort to turn psychohistory into a predictable paradigm leads towards results that strike me as irrelevant or distorting. Second, because I am not a psychoanalyst or a psychiatrist, I find some of the technical language, clinical paradigms, and social applications useless in my own approach to historical subjects. Last-and perhaps not least, even though it might seem a petty point-I find the predominance of certain American points of view and concerns disturbing-or worse. These are the self-hating and conspiratorial theories that block out proper evaluations of the persons and events being examined. This is something that will be dealt with soon.

For me, then, psychohistory is above all a humanistic art. It certainly can draw on modern psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and other related sciences and social sciences for insights and analogues, but in itself it is not a science in the sense of seeking to abstract general principles, create repeatable and thus qualitatively verifiable (or refutable) experiments or trials, and explain historical persons or events in formulaic, reductive terms. As a humanistic art psychohistory seeks to grasp historical persons and events in the fullness of their unique and dynamic reality, fullness meaning the rounded dimensions of unconscious individual and social, as well as biological forces.

For these reasons, I see psychohistory as an art of creative analysis and synthesis, taking things apart and putting them together again, and in the process coming to understand persons and events as more than the sum of their quantifiable parts-and more than what can be ascertained through strict protocols of evidential study in documentary archives, archeology, and iconography.

Though an objection might be raised that such an analytical creative approach tends towards poetry and mysticism, and I concede that such a tendency may always be present as a danger in sloppy, unsystematic research, my own argument is that, instead, psychohistory requires even more caution, skepticism and diligence than normally used in cultural anthropology or the history of emotions, for instance. The goal is to find a way to deal with the description and development of unspeakable, unimaginable and inconceivable matters in relation to the diversity of speakable, imaginable and conceivable options that the history of mentalities throws up when studying particular times, place, individuals, groups, and events.

There are two ways of describing the analytical creative approach I am advocating. It is above all not as a total replacement for other forms of psychohistory, but a suite suggestive tactics most appropriate for myself. One way such an approach can be explained is set out in a lengthy apology at the end of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle; there it seems a justification for the founder of psychoanalysis's attempt to argue for a deeply theoretical, social and philosophical dimension to his usual psychoanalytical studies derived from intense personal relationship with individual neurotic patients. The other way to describe the approach is to use the rabbinical mode of analyzing sacred texts known generally as midrash but coded into the anagram PaRDeS, that is, a four stage approach of peshat (Pa), remez ( R), devash (D) and sod (S).

But before that let me say something about the preponderance of these persistently annoying American views. By this, since I myself am an American citizen though living outside the USA since 1966, I do not mean that there is anything intellectually wrong with studying phenomena inside the country of one's birth or education or in emphasizing its people and founding principles. Indeed, the problem is that what I am talking about has to with a tendency, more marked in the last ten years, to hate America to the point of seeing it as the conspiratorial centre and cause of all the troubles in the world. In its latest manifestation, such irrational outbursts turn on the Bush Administration as the worst terrorists history has ever known, worse than Hitler and Stalin, and see as the Great Evil the American Heartland of Fundamentalist Christians, essentializing and demonizing them to a point way beyond anything else, such as Islamicist violence, misognyny, and superstition. It is as though, in other words, all the dispassionate and objective study of many American psychohistorians fails before the supposed disease of their own government, commercial enterprises, and cultural achievements. While something could be said about German or French psychohistory, I think the European perspective is significantly different. What is needed is not so much an ideological shift as an epistemological re-orientation, so that researchers try to locate themselves in-or at least have pertinent knowledge of-different languages, cultures, and periods of history. This “defamiliarization” would be part of the process of shaking up, breaking down, and reassembling the normative perceptions of persons, events, ideas, images, and feelings.

Having said that, now we can turn to the description of the creative analytic approach. As I said, the first way comes from attention to what Freud wrote at the end of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. After venturing to propose some new ideas to add to his basic views on psychoanalysis by positing that beyond the pleasure principle (Eros) there is also a principle or instinct for death (Thanatos), in the sense of a drive in all living organisms back towards their state of being inanimate, a regressive urge to repeat and so obviate the consequences of profoundly painful experiences, Freud finds that he can no longer find in scientific data good or sufficient clinical studies to back up his speculations-insights created in the course of long sessions of analysis of patients. The state of biology and especially neurobiology in the first two decades of the twentieth century was such that it was unable to grasp the dynamic realities that Freud and other psychoanalysts were discovering in their investigations of the human mind. For my case, however, it does not matter that Freud was not aware of or trust in the newer kinds of investigation that would bear greater fruit only after the Second World War in regard to developmental psychology, the chemistry of the brain, and the insights of quantum physics and genetics. What is important is that Freud writes:

It may be asked whether and how far I am myself convinced of the truth of the hypotheses that have been set out in these pages. My answer would be that I am not convinced myself and that I do not seek to persuade other people to believe in them. Or, more precisely, that I do not know how far I believe in them.