Traditionally, the study of history has had fixed
boundaries and focal points—periods, countries,
dramatic events, and great leaders. It also has had clear
and firm notions of scholarly procedure: how one
inquires into a historical problem, how one presents and
documents one's findings, what constitutes admissible
and adequate proof. The recent popular psychohistory,
committed to Freudian psychoanalysis, takes a radically
different approach. This commitment precludes a
commitment to history as historians have always
understood it. Psychohistory derives its "facts" not from
history, the detailed records of events and their
consequences, but from psychoanalysis of the
individuals who made history, and deduces its theories
not from this or that instance in their lives, but from a
view of human nature that transcends history. It denies
the basic criterion of historical evidence: that evidence
be publicly accessible to, and therefore assessable by,
all historians. Psychohistorians, convinced of the
absolute rightness of their own theories, are also
convinced that theirs is the "deepest" explanation of any
event that other explanations fall short of the truth.