“Whole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians — childhood history, content analysis of historical imagery, and so on — suddenly expand from the periphery to the center of the psychohistorian's conceptual world, simply because his or her own new questions require material nowhere to be found in history books.”

— Lloyd deMause

Source: Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), Ch. 2, ibid.

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Lloyd deMause 20

American thinker 1931

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“The history of credulity would be the most singular page in the great history of mankind. From those vast beliefs which have founded religions and empires, down to the inventions that garnish the last new murder, there has always been a tendency in the human mind to believe with as little expense of the reasoning faculty as possible.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

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“The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused. It is our task here to see how much of this childhood history can be recaptured from the evidence that remains to us. That this pattern has not previously been noticed by historians is because serious history has long been considered a record of public not private events. Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy sand-box of history, with its fantastic castles and magnificent battles, that they have generally ignored what is going on in the homes around the playground. And where historians usually look to the sandbox battles of yesterday for the causes of those of today, we instead ask how each generation of parents and children creates those issues which are later acted out in the arena of public life.”

Lloyd deMause (1931) American thinker

Source: The History of Childhood (1974), Ch. 1, The Evolution of Childrearing, opening paragraph.

“Psychohistory, like psychoanalysis, is a science in which the researcher's feelings are as much or even more a part of his research equipment than his eyes or his hands. […] Weighing of complex motives can only be accomplished by identification with human actors, the usual suppression of all feeling preached and followed by most "science" simply cripples a psychohistorian as badly as it would cripple a biologist to be forbidden the use of a microscope. The emotional development of a psychohistorian is therefore as much a topic for discussion as his or her intellectual development.”

Lloyd deMause (1931) American thinker

Source: Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), Ch. 2, p. 100.

“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day…
The lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Turning the Wheel (1981), section 2

“You're a historian. Tell me if there are any bath-tubs in history. I think they've been frightfully neglected.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

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“Psychohistory, as a science, will always be problem-centered, while history will always remain period-centered. They are simply two different tasks.”

Lloyd deMause (1931) American thinker

Source: Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), Ch. 2, ibid.

“I no longer believe that most traditional historians are emotionally equipped, even with training, to use their feelings as psychohistorical research tools, although there is a whole new generation of psychohistorians just now beginning to write who are able to do so. To expect the average historian to do psychohistory is like trying to teach a blind man to be an astronomer […]. Whenever I speak to a scholar of the emotional development necessary to make a good psychohistorian and get a blank look of total incomprehension, I try to find a way to leave the subject of psychohistory altogether. My listener usually is in another world of discourse where emotional reactions are not considered crucial to the results.”

Lloyd deMause (1931) American thinker

Source: Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), Ch. 2, ibid.

“In a history book, you can't imagine, you can't speculate, you can't conjure new worlds because that would ruin the history book. .... And in a novel you can't have too much fact-dumping, too much history, it just doesn't work, too much footnoting, again that ruins the story. So I love the fact that I can do speculation and imagination in one and go wild in a novel and then do proper, scrupulous research in the other. I think they compliment each other.”

Kate Williams (historian) (1974) British historian

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/entertainment-arts-17945784
Meet the Author: Kate Williams
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3 May 2012
2 May 2021

“Of the fifty or hundred systems of philosophy that have been advanced at different times of the world's history, perhaps the larger number have been, not so much results of historical evolution, as happy thoughts which have accidently occurred to their authors.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Architecture of Theories (1891)
Context: Of the fifty or hundred systems of philosophy that have been advanced at different times of the world's history, perhaps the larger number have been, not so much results of historical evolution, as happy thoughts which have accidently occurred to their authors. An idea which has been found interesting and fruitful has been adopted, developed, and forced to yield explanations of all sorts of phenomena. … The remaining systems of philosophy have been of the nature of reforms, sometimes amounting to radical revolutions, suggested by certain difficulties which have been found to beset systems previouslv in vogue; and such ought certainly to be in large part the motive of any new theory. … When a man is about to build a house, what a power of thinking he has to do, before he can safely break ground! With what pains he has to excogitate the precise wants that are to be supplied. What a study to ascertain the most available and suitable materials, to determine the mode of construction to which those materials are best adapted, and to answer a hundred such questions! Now without riding the metaphor too far, I think we may safely say that the studies preliminary to the construction of a great theory should be at least as deliberate and thorough as those that are preliminary to the building of a dwelling-house.

“The introduction of the Christian religion into the world has produced an incalculable change in history. There had previously been only a history of nations — there is now a history of mankind; and the idea of an education of human nature as a whole, — an education the work of Jesus Christ Himself — is become like a compass for the historian, the key of history, and the hope of nations.”

Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné (1794–1872) Swiss historian

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 141.

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