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tagonists. This is what Dilthey termed
"Einfuhlen"
and his Anglo–
Saxon prophet,
R.C.
Collingwood, called "getting into the mind of
the past. " These empathic skills of identification are what historians,
knowingly or unknowingly, daily use in their work, and they con–
stitute the art of history. These empathic arts may be refined and
conceptualized by the clinical arts of meeting the life problems that
people face and their adaptations to them. Each confrontation with
the self and the external world is also a meeting with the individual
and social past, including its adjustments, aberrations, and legacies
of trauma, fear, failure, and success .
Stannard thinks Freud adheres to a Cartesian mind-body
dualism. Another, more accurate, way of understanding Freud is to
acknowledge that he closed the breach between psyche and soma
which has existed since Plato.
If
Stannard were not so determined to
depreciate Freud, he would appreciate that, rather than creating "a
mind-body dichotomy ," psychoanalysis has integrated more closely
than ever the worlds of body and soul. No longer can we see "mind"
as higher and "matter" as lower. Freud demonstrated in theory and
practice the fine nuances of the interrelationship of mental and
physical states . These mutual influences have been conceptualized,
explored, and delineated by Freud and his successor psychoanalysts,
so that now historians may ask new questions about the coincidences
of breakdowns in health and turns of fortunes they see in political
figures and groups. Leon Trotsky self-assuredly wrote : "One can
foresee a revolution or a war, but it is impossible to foresee the con–
sequences of an autumn shooting-trip for wild ducks." Today's
historian may well be more modest than Trotsky in predicting the
onset of revolutions or wars, but brings greater insight and precision
to bear on the cross-influence of an ambivalent struggle for leader–
ship and physical collapse such as Trotsky suffered when he was
engaged in an intense conflict with Stalin for Lenin's mantle.
Much in Stannard's argument is thin and superficial. For ex–
ample, he accepts Edwin Weinstein's "diagnosis" of President
Woodrow Wilson's neurological illness without question, although it
is a nonclinical diagnosis questioned by other medical experts , and
Weinstein himself has altered his opinion on what troubled Wilson .
In 1970 he "diagnosed" a "cerebral vascular occlusion," a stroke . In
1978 Weinstein and co-authors decided it was not a stroke at all but
influenza and "probably a virus encephalopathy." Yet it is typical of
