What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.

To have a liberal temperament is a kind of psychological boon, To be able to understand that someone you disagree with is not just a terrible creature but somebody with whom you disagree.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did.

The ideas of theologians are refuted by their adversaries, the ideas of scientists are refuted by their followers.

Freud, Jung thought, had been a great discoverer of facts about the mind, but far too inclined to leave the solid ground of "critical reason and common sense." Freud for his part criticized Jung for being gullible about occult phenomena and infatuated with Oriental religions; he viewed with sardonic and unmitigated skepticism Jung's defense of religious feelings as an integral element in mental health. For Freud, religion was a psychological need projected onto culture, the child's feeling of helplessness surviving in adults, to be analyzed rather than admired.

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.