Back and forth he moves through this hierarchical spectrum of human activity to continually exercise the relationship between the individual life and the greater historical context. Religion, art, the state, political and religious organizations, form such contexts and permeate history. Here we have the germinal cell of history, for here the specific historical categories arise. After all, it is the interaction between the depths of human nature and the universal context of broad historical life which has an effect at every point of history, and this is the most fundamental connection between life itself and history. It is the entire web of connections which stretches from individuals concerned with their own existence to the cultural systems and communities and, finally, to the whole of mankind, which makes up the character of society and history.
Individuals are as much the logical subjects of history as communities and contexts.
Life, experience of life and the human studies are, thus, constantly related and interacting. Thus Dilthey establishes, with an imposing strength of reasoning, a proposition essential to history and specially meaningful to the work of oral history, namely that the basic unit in history is the individual life . How better to access this primal source than through oral history with its ability to sound all levels of thought, experience, development, and character in a living subject. We could reasonably suppose that both historians would have been ecstatic over the potential of oral history, and would have challenged us to provide through our work the most adequate means possible for reaching the real experience of the individuals who populate the issues we choose to investigate. This noted clinical psychiatrist made a professional virtue in his historical work of psychological exploration aimed at finding in personal development a central wellspring of human agency in history.