The Leader: Psychohistorical Essays

PETER GAY The syllabus of errors rehearsing the offenses of psychohistory looks devastating and seems irrefutable: crimes against the English language, crimes against sdentific procedures, crimes against common sense itself. These objects are real enough, but their contours-and their gravity­ mysteriously change with the perspective of the critic. From the outside, psychohistorians are to academic history what psychoanalysts are to academic psychology: a monolithic band of fanatics, making the same errors, committing the same offenses, aH in the same way. But seen close up, psychohistorians (just like psychoanalysts) turn out to be a highly differentiated, even a cheerfuHy contentious, lot. Disciples of Hartmann jostle discoverers of Kohut, imperialists claiming the whole domain of the past debate with modest isolationists, orthodox Freudians who insist that psychoanalysis engrosses the arsenal of psychohistorical method find themselves beleaguered by sociological revisionists. The charges that confound some psychohistorians glance off the armor of others. Yet there are three potent objections, aimed at the heart of psy­ chohistory, however it is conceived, that the psychohistorian ignores at his periI. It would be a convenient, but it is a whoHy unacceptable, defense to dismiss them as forms of resistance. The days are gone when the advocates of psychoanalysis could checkmate reasoned critidsms by psychoanalyzing the critic. To summarize these objections, psychohistory is Utopian, vulgar, ix x FOREWORD and trivial.

I: Perspectives. - 1. Introduction. - 2. Leaders in Ancient Times: Joseph, Plato, and Alcibiades. - 3. The Heroic Period in Psychohistory. - 4. Sigmund Freud and History. - 5. Erik H. Erikson, Ego Psychology, and the Great Man Theory. - 6. The Growth of Psychohistory. - 7. New Directions: Heinz Kohut. - II: Studies. - 8. Lincoln and the Crisis of the 1850s: Thoughts on the Group Self. - 9. The Transformations in the Self of Mahatma Gandhi. - 10. Woodrow Wilson Revisited: The Prepolitical Years. - 11. Mirror Image of the Nation: An Investigation of Kaiser Wilhelm II s Leadership of the Germans. - 12. Achievement and Shortfall in the Narcissistic Leader: Gough Whitlam and Australian Politics. - 13. Leaders and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation. - III: Conclusion. - 14. Reflections on Leadership.