ABSTRACT
I BECAME FAMILIAR with The Education of Henry Adams during the course of my collaborative work with Professor Mark Schwehn in 1978. A few years ago I described a similar collaboration with Professor Carl Pletsch, a biographer of Friedrich Nietzsche. 1 I met with Schwehn several times for two- to three-hour sessions and discussed with him selected materials that had been assigned by him. In this, as in my collaboration with Pletsch, we proceeded with the understanding that we would not attempt to become experts in each other’s fields. I consider myself a visitor in the historian’s laboratory and invite him to introduce me to the subject of his research in whatever way he considers feasible within the limitations of time. The objective of such a collaboration is to study the development of the historian’s creativity and to identify the origins of the ideas and attitudes presented in his writings. I assume that all historical investigations are subject to influences of the historian’s personality. These influences can be identified as transference reactions, in the sense that elements of the material under investigation reverberate with experiences from the investigator’s past and produce emotional responses that affect his thinking about his subject.
