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Reviewed by:
  • Dictators in the Mirror of Medicine: Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin
  • Robert P. Hudson
Anton Neumayr. Dictators in the Mirror of Medicine: Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin. Translated by David J. Parent. Bloomington, Ill.: Medi-Ed Press, 1995. 462 pp. Ill. $34.95.

In his 1958 presidential address before the American Historical Association, William Langer contended that the historian’s “next assignment” should address the potential of what is now called psychohistory. 1 The use of psychoanalysis (his proposed tool) by historians certainly has increased since that time. So too have thoughtful caveats about the limitations of the approach. Anton Neumayr clearly counts himself among the enthusiasts of psychohistory. In the book at hand he uses clinical and psychological data in an attempt to elucidate the behavioral evolution of three of what might be called history’s “megalo-monsters,” Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin. The result is intriguing, often enlightening, but also something of a case study of the limitations of psychohistory. [End Page 726]

The book is well made and eminently readable in David Parent’s translation. In content, it is largely a synthesis of syntheses, mostly German and French. Although there are some 280 direct quotations, many quite lengthy, there are no citations as such, only a bibliography and index of proper names.

A measure of Neumayr’s confidence in retrospective diagnosis is revealed in his statement that somatic disease can be clarified “with great certainty” from biographical sources (p. 8). Many historians of personal illness would have a problem with this sanguine assessment. Among his many examples, he finds no evidence of epilepsy in Napoleon, and concludes that his autopsy did not show cancer of the stomach, although there are thoughtful recent studies contrary to both these opinions.

A major problem with the psychoanalytic approach is that when you look hard at the matter, there often is not much known about the relevant childhoods, particularly from the subjects themselves. There are other generic problems with the method as well. Psychopathology is largely a descriptive endeavor, much as general medicine was in 1800. Behavioral traits are given names, and when several such names appear in one person, the words become a diagnosis. When the traits (words) are encountered again, the diagnosis is automatic. In this way, Hitler, for example, had “narcissistic megalomania.” In extreme form the traits combine to “cause” or “allow” the subject to engage in such horrors as mass murders. Behavioral science is only now on the threshold of finding objective tools of the sort that rescued somatic medicine from the descriptive diagnosis and circular reasoning characteristic of psychohistory today.

The enduring obstacle confronting psychohistory, indeed psychology generally, is that myriads of persons have early lives similar to Hitler’s, and develop the same behavioral traits, some even in the extreme, but they never so much as raise a fist against another human being. In his epilogue, Neumayr reaches the edge of this abyss, and bridges it by invoking Lipót Szondi’s postulate that 6 percent of the population have an inherent “killing mentality” due to an “e” radical, and another 14 percent are “disguised” carriers of the trait. Neumayr does not define the “e” radical other than to say that Szondi had tests to identify it. Given what we know of human history and the distribution of biological characteristics, it is possible that a “killing mentality” exists in all of us, exhibiting greater dominance in some. Even if this is true, it leaves us a long way from discovering if and how our early lives influence the expression of such traits. In medical science, it is not erroneous theory that so often leads to mischief, but its premature application. Something similar may apply to much of psychohistory as practiced today.

Robert P. Hudson
University of Kansas Medical Center

Footnotes

1. William L. Langer, “The Next Assignment,” Amer. Hist. Rev., 1958, 63(2): 283–304.

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