The forces of passion and irrationality which are all about us, as well as in us, are so overwhelming in history that only by the utmost stretching of all plausibility can they be denied. There are many phenomena which a conventional political-social history cannot adequately account for with utilitarian and material categories of explanation. Historians are scrupulous and painstaking in ascertaining whether an event has taken place and when it occurred. Yet in explaining the event they have too often been content with the amateur maxims of common sense and the explanation of historical accident" to cover blunders, coincidence of events, or subjective feelings in the historian that are too uncomfortable to face. Historians must be determinists. The attribution of historical events to "accidents" is usually the historian's way of saying: "I do not know or cannot look any further."

Historians see in their materials only what they are prepared to perceive. Thus the value of any conceptual framework is what new combinations of data or inferences from the data it may contribute to the historian's ability to interpret documents and the other raw material of history. A knowledge of psychodynamics sensitizes the historical researcher to nuances of shifting relationships in the documentary material that he might not otherwise notice and respond to. Psychohistorians treat the same sources as other historians: government documents, diaries, journals, and memoirs, cultural and literary artifacts, account books and fiscal data. However, they observe them with new lenses.

A psychological contribution to history consists of three essentials: (1) It seeks the function of the unconscious in human behavior as evidenced by life styles, adaptations, creativity and sublimations, character, slips of speech, hearing, and writing, errors, accidents, dreams, neuroses and psychoses, and human action or inhibition. (2) Psychohistory is a genetic approach in the sense that it is historical It emphasizes the importance of origins, antecedents, and patterns of repetition. Thus it is developmental, stressing the longitudinal growth and adaptation of the person, including events and learned behaviors from infancy, childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Psychohistory is oriented to dynamic psychology in which the present reality interacts at all times with and is related to the personal and social past of the person in the unconscious. (3) Psychohistory gives due place to the aggression, sexuality, passions, fantasy, and emotional states of the inner world of its subjects. It rejects the myth of the asexuality and innocence of child or adult, man or woman. Psychohistory recognizes that the fantasies of the subject, rather than meaning externally ascribed, constitute the relevant determinant of the emotional meaning of an event, symbol, or image.

Psychohistorians seek patterns, repetitions, deviant cases, and their meanings in the private and often unconscious world of their subjects and of themselves. They pursue visible traces of the unconscious and its defenses. Psychohistory is, to paraphrase what Freud said of psychoanalysis, a general history. His view of his work was that "the main value of my synthesis lies in its linking together the neurotic and normal processes." The human personality is indivisible. The processes we know clinically are just as relevant to this morning's newspaper or yesteryear's diary or legislative conflict as to a patient's neurotic symptom. It was Marc Bloch who said: "Historical facts are, in essence, psychological facts. Normally, therefore, they find their antecedents in other psychological facts." While historians have always recognized the role of emotions and irrationality in human action, they now have begun to account for a proportion of previously inexplicable behavior by seeking patterns of explanation using the insights that the science of psychodynamics has developed in this century.

Historians study past human actions, thoughts, and motives. This is also what the psychoanalyst studies in his patients. When dealing with issues of motivation, both disciplines are committed to the theory of overdetermination. It would be a poor historian who would maintain that a major historical event had only one cause. We must necessarily look to many levels of causation and appraise the significance of each. Freud too insisted upon the overdetermined nature of the affects, dreams, and symptoms of psychic life. Thus both disciplines seek multiple explanations for single phenomena; both disciplines follow the law of the conservancy of evidence. No detail is so minor that it can be ignored, no deviant case is so trivial that it may be overlooked. This distinguishes history and psychoanalysis from the social and the natural sciences that seek to fit or subsume individual events under general covering laws of behavior. The epistemological problem is identical for the historian and the psychoanalyst. They must both reconstruct, or re-create in their minds, the life of their subjects.