In Fantasy and Reality in History, Peter Loewenberg brings what the discipline of psychoanalysis has learned about human conduct and the irrational to bear on the analysis and writing of history. The result is a remarkable series of studies on individual and social anxiety, racism and nationalism, and crisis management.
First examining early twentieth century Zurich and the first practitioners of psychoanalysis--Freud, C.G. Jung, Karl Abraham, and others--to establish the discipline's understanding of the unconscious and how it functions, Loewenberg then explores the tensions in...

In Decoding the Past, Peter Loewenberg has collected eleven of his brilliant essays on psychohistory, a discipline that has emerged from the synthesis of traditional historical analysis and clinical psychoanalysis. He surveys this relatively new fi eld-its methods and its problems-to show the special contributions that psychoanalysis can make to history. He then further explores the psychohistorical method by applying it to studies of personality, cultures, groups, and mass movements, demonstrating that psychohistory offers one of the most powerful of interpretive approaches to history.