In Quest of the Psychohistorical Lincoln

Abstract

The inner life of Lincoln has been explored intermittently over the years with indifferent success. Mark E. Neely, Jr., in The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (1982), goes so far as to declare that all psychobiographies of the man to date have been unmitigated disasters. That judgment by a historian is no doubt too harsh for universal acceptance. One finds, for example, that L. Pierce Clark's pioneering effort, Lincoln: a Psycho-Biography, though disparaged by historians when it appeared half a century ago, received generally favorable reviews from social scientists and is still cited occasionally by them with respect. Nevertheless, its 570 page blend of lushly sentimental narrative and technical psychoanalytic exposition had no perceptible influence on Lincoln scholarship. The psychohistorical approach to the past, although it has lately become a flourishing subdiscipline, continues to be suspect among historians. Much of the difficulty arises from the incompatibility of its main working premise with the traditional rules of historical evidence; for if the primary sources of human motivation do lie hidden beneath the surface of consciousness, then the psychohistorian must use the documentary record as a mere base of operations from which to seek the implicit meaning of explicit behavior. His task, by its very nature, constantly draws him away from the realm of fact into that of inference. Occupational necessity accordingly tends to release his imagination from certain restraints of the historical method, and the result sometimes is a kind of writing described by Gordon Wood as quite fiction, but . . . not quite history either. For the chronic weakness of his evidence, the psychohistorian compensates with elaborate theory, most of it drawn thus far from psychoanalysis. But