BOOKS
EXPANDING HISTORY
SHRINKING HISTORY: ON FREUD AND THE FAILURE OF PSYCHO·
HISTORY.
By
David E. Stannard.
Oxford University Press. $12.95.
A critical review of a new historical method could have
considerable value as a prod to its adherents, and as an assessment
and evaluation for the profession. Unhappily, this book has no such
merit. Nor does it have the redeeming virtue of being wrong-headed
yet posing valuable questions. It is derivative, redundant, concretely
literal, and intellectually perverse. Stannard presumes to forever
dispose of the idea of applying psychoanalytic knowledge to histori–
cal research . He pursues that enterprise with the ardor of a prep
school debater and the stance of a prosecuting attorney, to the detri–
ment of clarity or serious comprehension . He seeks to dismiss psy–
choanalysis as a theory as well as a therapy, and thereby to discredit
its application to history and culture . To do this the author relies on
all the old bromides and arguments of clinical efficacy, logical circu-
1arity and reductionism.
Stannard sets up a series of straw men, beginning with Freud
as an Italian Renaissance scholar. He offers Freud's
1910
essay on
Leonardo da Vinci as "a sample of the type of work done by the
psychohistorian ." He then hectors the piece as if it was the cardinal
contemporary example of psychohistory. He relies on the factual er–
rors and mistranslations first pointed out in a classic article by the
art historian Meyer Shapiro in
1956.
The difference between
Shapiro and Stannard in tone and respect for what Freud was doing
is striking. Stannard finds that "Freud's reconstruction of Leonardo's
early childhood must be discarded as historically worthless and clin–
ically not much better." By contrast, Shapiro's modulated evaluation
is that Freud's
false conclusions do not imply that psychoanalytic theory is
wrong; the book on Leonardo, a brilliantjeu
d'esprit,
is no real
test of this theory, which here has been faultily applied . Just as a
theory of physics would not be di sproved by an experiment with
incomplete or incorrectly recorded data, so Freud's general ac·
count of psychological development and the unconscious process
is untouched by the poss ible misapplications to Leonardo.
