“…Simonton search may be styled psychohistory in the genenc sense that these studies apply psychological theones and techniques to histoncal and biographical data (Simonton, 1983b) Given this broad conception, psychohistorlcal practice has adopted two main forms On the one hand, psychobiography purports to favor the ldiographic analysis of a single case, employing qualitative methodologies (Runyan, 1982(Runyan, , 1988 This tradition may be said to have been launched by Freud's (1910Freud's ( /1964) classic treatment of Leonardo da Vinci (Elms, 1988), even though its major proponent withm personality psychology may have been Gordon Allport (1961), the champion of the ldiographic perspective (see also Enkson, 1958Enkson, , 1969 On the other hand, histonometry prefers the nomothetic analysis of multiple cases via quantitative methods This alternative tradition started with Galton's (1869) Hereditary Genius, albeit the term "histonometry" was not coined until the present century (Woods, 1909), when the methodology became more fully developed as well (Cox, 1926, Thomdike, 1950 ' Nevertheless, when we more closely inspect how psychobiography and histonometry are actually practiced, the distinction between the two begins to break down To begin with, much psychobiography is truly nomothetic If ldiographic analysis is construed as an attempt to unearth the regulanties or pattems unique to a single life, then to apply some nomothetic theory hardly provides a bona fide illustration Indeed, psychobiographers frequently operate, at least implicitly, according to Hempel's "covenng law" model of explanation (Hempel, 1965) Particular events m individual biography are subsumed under general psychological pnnciples such that the single case becomes an illustration of a more pervasive phenomenon "History is not of interest for its own sake, rather, it is used to populanze or confirm current psychoanalytic theones" (Kohut, 1986, p 343) Again, Freud's treatment of Leonardo may offer the model, for certainly Leonardo was pnmanly viewed not as an exception but as an exemplification of psychoanalytic laws (Elms, 1988) On the other side of the distinction, even if the norm has been for histonometncians to analyze dozens, and sometimes thousands of cases, it IS not true that histonometry is lnvanably a large-N enterpnse At times quantitative and nomothetic techniques will find applications in the lives of a single creator or leader, such as Napoleon (Simonton, 1979), Robert E Lee (Suedfeld, Corteen, & McCormick, 1986) Nixon (Winter & Carlson, 1988), Henry Kissinger…”