Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach

In Decoding the Past, Peter Loewenberg has collected eleven of his brilliant essays on psychohistory, a discipline that has emerged from the synthesis of traditional historical analysis and clinical psychoanalysis. He surveys this relatively new fi eld-its methods and its problems-to show the special contributions that psychoanalysis can make to history. He then further explores the psychohistorical method by applying it to studies of personality, cultures, groups, and mass movements, demonstrating that psychohistory offers one of the most powerful of interpretive approaches to history.

Peter Loewenberg is professor of history and political psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.