Problems of a Naturalistic Psychohistory

Abstract

The basic problems of psychohistory, and therefore of the most widely practiced subdiscipline of history which purports to deal with the problems of human nature in history, issue from difficulties of establishing universally valid psychological norms. This simply restates for psychohistory the usual nature-or-culture dilemmas, which appear as predominantly biological or cultural-historical explanations of the formation of the human psyche. The more power psychohistory yields to historical culture over the formation of the human psyche, the more it appears as a special form of historical indeterminism or historicism.The more power it concedes to a fixed biological inheritance, the more it becomes a form of naturalism. Of all the social sciences (ethology not included) applied to history, psychology is presumably the only fundamentally naturalistic one. No psychohistorian would deny that man has a biological nature, yet none of them has succeeded where psychologists themselves have failed, in observing, analyzing, and describing it indisputably qua nature. Thus, even when psychohistorians make normative statements which presumably derive from scientific biological knowledge rather than cultural perspectives and values, they are vulnerable to the positivists' criticism that they are not presenting a scientific biopsychology