Author: Michael Robinson
Psychohistory is an aspect of the psychodynamic approach to leadership which, according to Northouse (2013), “consists of attempts to explain the behavior of historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Hitler” (p. 321). Essentially, psychohistory attempts to piece together the early childhood experiences and family backgrounds of historical figures, in hopes of offering explanations as to why the figures turned out the way that they did. In particular, psychohistory, like psychoanalysis in general, is concerned primarily with unconscious emotional responses which result from these early experiences (Lesson 3). In other words, the emotional motivations of a dictator’s malevolent acts, or a tyrannical boss’s unrealistic expectations and domineering attitude, might be explained by the pain and anger associated with repressed childhood memories. The conscious mind is a slave to the subconscious, which really pulls the strings behind the scenes. Since learning about this peculiar subset of psychodynamics, I have been honing my expertise of two weeks, in an attempt to gain insights into the less desirable traits of my current and former superiors. There is, however, a slight problem with my newfound interest in playing armchair psychologist that renders my work quite unreliable: psychohistory is a pseudoscience. Psychohistory is pseudoscientific because its hypotheses regarding specific figures are not falsifiable. This is true because psychohistory’s claims, as they pertain to specific leaders, cannot be tested with the experimental rigor necessary to establish causality. Psychohistory cannot account for, and exclude, other variables with independent explanatory power, it cannot account for divergent cases, and it does not make reliable, testable predictions regarding future behavior.
One example of psychohistory’s inability to establish a causal link between the trauma of an early childhood experience and present day actions is the fact that it is not able to exclude equally plausible, alternative explanations for behavior. For example, I once had a boss who had founded the technology firm that I used to work for. He was an excellent business person, and took his company from a fledgling startup of five employees to a multimillion dollar corporation of over thirty employees in just under five years. However, he had some idiosyncrasies that really irritated his employees at times. Notably, he had a tendency to micromanage. He was the classic hoverer who made his employees feel like their every move was being scrutinized. He did not allow them enough space to be able to apply their own ideas and complete a project autonomously. He really did have a tendency to sweat the small stuff. Now, a curious fact about my boss is that his mother had abandoned him and his brother in childhood for several years. She literally disappeared one day, leaving two small children to come home to an empty house and fend for themselves. My boss and his brother actually managed to survive for over a month before anyone found out what was going on and got child protective services involved. Another curious fact about my boss is that he also happened to have been diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, which a growing consensus in the mental health community feel is attributable to biological origins. His tendency to want to control every small detail of a situation extended well beyond his executive role, and permeated almost every aspect of his daily life. A psychohistorian may attempt to attribute my boss’s controlling nature to an unconscious expression of the trauma he experienced when he was abandoned by his mother. However, what mechanism does psychohistory have for showing this is the actual reason for his controlling nature, when the real reason could be his obsessive compulsive disorder? Both of these factors are plausible as possible explanations for my boss’s behavior. When multiple plausible explanations exist for a given trait, psychohistory does not provide a mechanism for ruling out the other possibilities and establishing early childhood experiences as the definitive cause. Furthermore, since psychohistory is merely descriptive, and attempts to explain why people are the way that they are without offering any practical behavior modification techniques, there are no interventions that might alleviate undesirable traits that are caused by repressed traumatic experiences, but that will not necessarily work on those caused by other factors. If such interventions existed, this might be a way to distinguish psychohistorical explanations from other possible explanations. However, psychohistory does not provide any.
A second blow to psychohistory’s scientific merit is its inability to account for divergent cases. Returning to the example of my boss, recall that his brother experienced the same childhood events. My boss’s brother also happened to be a manager in the same company that my boss founded, and his leadership style was entirely different than my boss’s. The brother was the person that most of the employees wished my boss was. He had a very hands-off style of leadership, and would communicate his expectations to his subordinates and then allow them to go to work. As long as they produced and met established performance benchmarks, his subordinates largely had free rein of their own projects. What explanation could psychohistory offer for such dramatic differences in two contemporaries who had experienced very similar childhoods? Sure, someone who applies psychoanalytic techniques may attempt to explain away these profound differences by saying that the same experience can affect different people in different ways, and that my boss may have incorporated the experience into his subconscious differently than his brother. However, this just adds another layer of untestable conceptual baggage to an already problematic theory. How does psychohistory standardize the measurement of the impact that a given experience had on one brother versus the other, and establish the mechanisms by which the two brothers internalized the experience differently. Simply saying “people are different,” without quantifying those differences, is just an ad hoc attempt to dismiss inconvenient observations that call the veracity of psychohistory into question.
Psychohistory also does not make reliable, testable predictions regarding future behavior. Psychohistory operates by first examining an individual’s life, and then working backwards to look for repressed events that might explain behavior after the fact (Northouse, 2013). In the case of my boss and his brother, someone attempting to use psychohistory to explain their leadership styles would begin by examining their leadership styles and then gathering a history of their early childhood and family experiences. This is problematic, because it allows one to cherry pick, and keep looking for a traumatic event that can serve as a plausible explanation for current behavior. This is inherently unfalsifiable, because parallels can be drawn between any two events in hindsight. No causal relationship can be established with this reverse reasoning. To be credible, psychohistory would need to predict the future leadership styles of individuals based on specific past experiences to some degree of accuracy, and then demonstrate that this relationship is more than just correlational. However, psychohistory does not attempt to do this, because it is inherently biographical in nature. A theory cannot be considered scientific if it does not make testable predictions, and merely hunts for possible explanations after the fact.
This has hardly been a rigorous treatment of psychohistory’s shortcomings as a credible scientific endeavor. However, the general criticisms raised, as illustrated by the particular cases of my boss and his brother, should at least serve as a starting point to call psychohistory’s validity into question. Psychohistory lacks some of the hallmark features of a true scientific theory. When competing alternative explanations for a behavior exist (which they almost always do), psychohistory is unable to exclude them in favor of its own explanations. When persons with a common history exhibit drastically different behaviors under the same circumstances, psychohistory is unable to explain what specifically causes such radical divergence in the face of such a powerful influence. Psychohistory is also a biographical field, and its explanations are inherently ad hoc. Since it begins with already existing facts and attempts to assign explanations to them, rather than predicting future outcomes, psychohistory is open to criticisms of cherry picking. One of the important first lessons in this course was the difference between a theory and a maxim (Lesson 1). Psychohistory fails to pass scientific muster for many of the same reasons that maxims do. In attempting to analyze the leadership characteristics of specific individuals, it would be wise to turn to other theories with better scientific grounding, and leave psychohistory on the back burner.
References
Lesson 1: Introduction to leadership. (2014). Retrieved September 11, 2014, from https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/fa14/psych485/002/content/01_lesson/01_page.html
Lesson 3: Introduction to psychodynamic approach. (2014). Retrieved September 11, 2014, from https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/fa14/psych485/002/content/03_lesson/01_page.html
Northouse, P. G. (2013). Leadership: Theory and practice (6th ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.