Psychohistory
Psychohistory is the study of historical motivations, combining the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present. The center for psychohistorical research is The Institute for Psychohistory which has 19 branches around the globe and has for 30 years published The Journal of Psychohistory.
The director of the Institute is Lloyd deMause, whose work is used in most college courses in psychohistory, and who is the founding president of the International Psychohistorical Association, whose annual convention is held in New York City in June of every year.
Influential people in the field of psychohistory include Alice Miller and Julian Jaynes.
External links
- The Institute for Psychohistory -- this website contains over 1,500 pages of psychohistorical articles and books with full scholarly references
Psychohistory was also the name of a fictional science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy universe, which combined history, psychology and mathematical statistics to create a (nearly) exact science of the behavior of very large populations of people, such as the Galactic Empire. Asimov used the analogy of a gas, where whilst the motion of a single molecule is very difficult to predict, the mass behavior of the gas can be predicted to a high level of accuracy.