Addressing the American Historical Association in 1958, William L. Langer emphasized that the psychological effects of the Black Death were a significant historical phenomenon and he proposed that the matter be studied by the methods of psychoanalysis. Since then the psychological aspects of historical events and personages have increasingly attracted attention, indeed to such an extent that th...

and group history, and ally themselves closely to Freud, believing that psychohistory is the fulfilment of his dream of solving the great cultural and historical riddles of mankind by his method. However, until psychoanalysis itself has been adequately evaluated, there can be no legitimate applied psychoanalysis. The psychohistorians make voluble claims for their new approach, but its impact on...

History written without psychological insight is like a meal without salt and spices: dull, tasteless and flat. Herodotus, the father of all historians, is so readable today because he characterized all his figures, from the most ancient Egyptians and Persians to his contemporary Greeks, by their likes and dislikes, by their loves and hates, their ambitions and frustrations, their motives good ...

first with the poetic view of mind, with examples from Homer and the tragedians, second with the philosopher's, i.e. largely Plato's, and finally with the medical, i.e. the early Hippocratic texts. All three approaches are combined in a discussion of hysteria, in which he also stresses the social and sexual prohibitions of Athenian women and the ambivalent, yet often effective, distancing of th...

Each section is broken down into subsections ; thus 'Historiography' consists of 'History of historical writing' and 'Studies of historians'. Book and article titles are grouped separately and individual entries have full citations, together with a very brief descriptive comment in many instances. There is a name index only. Many references to sociology are listed, and although 'Psychohistory',...

Edward Jarvis's Autobiography (completed in 1873) was dictated, in the third person when he was seventy, to his wife, Almira (1804-1884), a silent figure who was an alter ego throughout their marriage. It gives a retrospective view of his life, is a reworking of the diaries he kept as a young man, and an interesting document of re-written, oral autobiography, but it is not a "confession" in the...

JOHN McMANNERS, Death and the Enlightenment. Changing attitudes to death among Christians and unbelievers in eighteenth-century France,'Oxford University Press, 1981, 8vo, pp. vii, 619, £17.50. JOACHIM WHALEY (editor), Mirrors ofmortality. Studies in the social history of death, London, Europa, 1981, pp. vii, 252, £19.50. There is no more universal social fact than death ("never send to know fo...