GRE Reading Comprehension
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Source: CHP
Traditionally, the study of history has had fixed boundaries and focal points—periods, countries, dramatic events, and great leaders. It 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, whatconstitutes admissible and adequate proof. The recent popular psychohistory, committed to Freudian psychoanalysis, takes a radically different approach. This commitment precludes a commitment to history as historians have always understood it. Psychohistory 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. It denies the basic criterion of historical evidence: that evidence be publicly accessible to, and therefore assessable by, all historians. Psychohistorians, convinced of the absolute rightness of their own theories, are also convinced that theirs is the "deepest" explanation of any event that other explanations fall short of the truth.
Question List: 1 2
The author of the passage puts the word ―deepest‖ in quotation marks most probably in order to
- A question the usefulness of psychohistorians‘ insights into traditional historical scholarship
- B draw attention to a contradiction in the psychohistorians‘ method
- C emphasize the major difference between the traditional historians‘ method and that of psychohistorians
- D disassociate her opinion of the psychohistorians‘ claims from her opinion of their method
- E signal her reservations about the accuracy of psychohistorians‘ claims for their work