Even for the psychoanalyst, these are the most difficult areas, and the most difficult time, of human life to get evidence about; this is why full analyses run toward the interminable. For the biographer with little or no access to reports of the dreams of his subject—very few of anyone’s dreams have been recorded—or to the other ways in which the unconscious most often gives itself away, “psychobiography” inevitably becomes speculative. Freud’s own ventures into the field are not reassuring. Art historians have pointed out that the smile of the Mona Lisa was a standard way of painting a certain emotion, not necessarily an unconscious revival of a childhood sexual memory of Leonardo da Vinci. American political historians have been even more dismissive of the joint effort by Freud and William C. Bullitt to write a psychological biography of Woodrow Wilson.
In practice, many psychohistorians have adopted the psychoanalytic theories of the analyst who analyzed them (a few have become psychoanalysts themselves). The problem of getting evidence for psychobiographies is easier, however, if one accepts the American revision of Freudianism known as ego psychology. This theory denies that personality is fixed after the age of five; it can still be substantially influenced by what goes on later, especially in adolescence. The most influential exponent of this approach for biographers was Erik Erikson, who propounded an eight-stage theory of the normative life course and wrote substantial psychobiographies of Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi. The overriding theme of both was the way in which an individual leader, working out his own “identity crisis,” was also able to do what Erikson called “the dirty work of his society.” This reinterpretation of the “great man” theory of history (which holds that the course of history is determined by a few individuals) made it possible to argue not only that culture influences adolescent personality development but also that adolescent personality development might at times powerfully influence culture.
Construal of evidence by psychobiographers can be radically different from normal historical practice (as reviewers were not slow to remind Erikson). Historians are accustomed to “weighing” the evidence, almost in a literal sense. Frequent iteration of an attitude generally persuades, even if there are one or two exceptions. For the psychobiographer, an apparently trivial event or slip of the pen can be the vital clue to the personality of the subject. Luther’s toilet habits, treatment of Hitler’s mother by a Jewish doctor who used a gas therapy in an attempt to cure her cancer, or Baudouin I of Belgium’s auto accident a few years before World War II would be dismissed by many historians as of dubious relevance to public careers; to psychobiographers they can be the foundation of an entire work.
Although they cannot study dreams, biographers have in the writings of poets and novelists a kind of public dream. Deciphering these for their disguised biographical content runs against current literary critical as well as historiographical orthodoxy, yet many biographers of writers place great stock in their ability to do this. The conventional historian, asked to describe Nathaniel Hawthorne’s state of mind during the years he lived at Salem, would look for the various documents he produced while he was there. But these throw little light on the question. The literary biographer, in contrast, claims to be able to answer it by interpreting the works that Hawthorne wrote while he was there. One has even said that, no matter how much other, more usual evidence might turn up, he would still stay with what he drew from his interpretation.
Like cliometrics, psychohistory was a fashionable methodology in the 1960s and ’70s but has become distinctly less fashionable since. It has to a degree been discredited by the excesses of some of its partisans, and its difficulties proved greater than most of its early advocates had expected. Just as biography has made a contribution to historiography generally through prosopography (the study of related persons within a given historical context), collective psychology has reappeared in a psychoanalytic study of early adherents of Nazism and in the history of mentalités (semiarticulated or even unconsciously held beliefs and attitudes that set limits to what is thinkable; see below Social and cultural history). Freud’s exercise in group dynamics, Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse (1921; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego), was appropriated by Henry Abelove for his fine study The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists (1990). These are signs that neither the biographical nor the psychohistorical impulse has exhausted its energy. Diplomatic history
Diplomatic history comes closer than any other branch of history to being “completed”—not in the sense that everything about past diplomatic relationships has been discovered but rather in the sense that apparently all the techniques proper to it have been perfected. Unfortunately, the sharpest set of tools is useless without the matter on which to work, and in this respect historians of 20th- and 21st-century diplomacy are at a considerable disadvantage compared with those of earlier periods.
There is probably no branch of history—excepting perhaps biography—in which access to sources is so tricky, or their interpretation so difficult. The main obstacle to contemporary diplomatic history is the shroud of security that almost every state has thrown over its records, especially states that have mixed conventional diplomacy with covert operations. Historians typically have to wait 30 years or more for state papers to be declassified. The photocopying machine, however, created new opportunities for diplomatic leaks, most notably the publication in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed American planning for military intervention in Indochina from World War II until 1968 (see also Vietnam War).
After coming to power in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks gave historians of the origins of World War I a bonanza by publishing the secret dispatches of the tsarist government, which for the first time revealed the web of alliances and secret agreements that had allowed a Balkan incident eventually to embroil all the great powers. Each government thereupon published its own editions of documents. This plethora of documentation did not allow historians to reach consensus about the responsibility for starting the war, but the blame was certainly allocated more evenly than it had been in the “war guilt” clause of the Treaty of Versailles. Many historians in Britain and the United States concluded that the Germans were no more responsible than anyone else for starting the war. Surprisingly, in 1961 a German historian, Fritz Fischer (1908–99 ), reopened this question with Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegziel politik das kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1914/18 (1961; Germany’s Aims in the First World War, 1967), kindling a lively debate in West Germany.
Comparatively little was said about the diplomacy preceding World War II—and there was little basis for saying anything—until more than the captured papers of Nazi Germany were made completely available (the British prime minister and historian Winston Churchill simply took the relevant English state papers with him when writing his six-volume history of the war). It has seemed obvious that Hitler intended to start a war, if not necessarily on September 1, 1939. But the postwar relations between the United States and the Soviet Union became the subject of controversy when the American historians William Appleman Williams (1921–90) and Gabriel Kolko (1932–2014) challenged the conventional American view that the Soviets intended world conquest and were deterred only by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its nuclear umbrella. Williams and his students, who were influential in the 1960s, produced a series of revisionist accounts of the outbreak of the Korean War and later of the Vietnam War. These were in turn attacked by defenders of the orthodox view.