❶Traditionally, the study of history has had fixed boundaries and focal points—periods, countries, dramatic events, and great leaders. ❷It 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.❶Anyone who has followed recent historical literature can testify to the revolution that is taking place in historical studies. ❷The currently fashionable subjects come directly from the sociology catalog: childhood, work, leisure. ❸The new subjects are accompanied by new methods. ❹Where history once was primarily narrative, it is now entirely analytic. ❺The old questions “What happened?” and “How did it happen?” have given way to the question “Why did it happen?” ❻Prominent among the methods used to answer the question “Why” is psychoanalysis, and its use has given rise to psychohistory.❶Psychohistory does not merely use psychological explanations in historical contexts. ❷Historians have always used such explanations when they were appropriate and when there was sufficient evidence for them. ❸But this pragmatic use of psychology is not what psychohistorians intend. ❹They are committed, not just to psychology in general, but to Freudian psychoanalysis. ❺This commitment precludes a commitment to history as historians have always understood it. ❻Psychohistory 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. ❼It denies the basic criterion of historical evidence: that evidence be publicly accessible to, and therefore assessable by, all historians. ❽And it violates the basic tenet of historical method: that historians be alert to the negative instances that would refute their theses. ❾Psychohistorians, convinced of the absolute rightness of their own theories, are also convinced that theirs is the “deepest” explanation of any event, and that other explanations fall short of the truth.❶Psychohistory is not content to violate the discipline of history (in the sense of the proper mode of studying and writing about the past); it also violates the past itself. ❷It denies to the past an integrity and will of its own, in which people acted out of a variety of motives and in which events had a multiplicity of causes and effects. ❸It imposes upon the past the same determinism that it imposes upon the present, thus robbing people and events of their individuality and of their complexity. ❹Instead of respecting the particularity of the past, it assimilates all events, past and present, into a single deterministic schema that is presumed to be true at all times and in all circumstances.1. Which of the following best states the main point of the passage?