Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire The causes and mechanisms of the Fall of the Western Roman Empire are a historical theme that was introduced by historian Edward Gibbon in his 1776 book "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". He started an ongoing historiographical discussion about what caused the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the reduced power of the remaining Eastern Empire, in the 4th–5th centuries. Gibbon was not the first to speculate on why the Empire collapsed, but he was the first to give a well-researched and well-referenced account.
Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire in "The Politics of Psychoanalysis" (1987). He noted that Freud would not have agreed with Eysenck that psychoanalysis is a matter of "literary art" rather than science. Malcolm Macmillan described Eysenck as one of several authors to have argued that Anna O. suffered from an organic malady in "Freud Evaluated" (1991). He observed these authors provide conflicting accounts of what malady Anna O. suffered from, and argued that establishing any retrospective diagnosis with certainty is difficult. Richard Webster suggested in "Why Freud Was Wrong" (1995) that "Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire" contains many cogent criticisms of Freud. However,