Bruce Mazlish, a historian of ideas who created controversy with psychoanalytic biographies of living world leaders, including one about Richard M. Nixon that assessed him as constantly seeking crises to confront as a way of handling unresolved childhood traumas, died on Sunday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 93.

His wife, Neva Goodwin, confirmed the death on Tuesday.

Professor Mazlish spent nearly his entire career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he said his experience teaching European history to young scientists and engineers inspired a lifelong interest in understanding the divide between science and the humanities, a disconnect considered a crisis in academia during the postwar years.

To bridge that divide, Professor Mazlish wrote about the philosophical underpinnings of space exploration, the literary history of artificial intelligence and the bewilderment shared by neuroscientists and psychologists alike over the irrationality at the core of human behavior.

His first book, “The Western Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel,” a collaboration with the British mathematician and poet Jacob Bronowski, traced the roots of modern science and social analysis to a common lode of insights about the world that emerged during the Renaissance. It has been in print since it was first published in 1960.

Professor Mazlish was best known for putting Nixon on the couch in “In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry” (1972). The book, by his reckoning, was an attempt to fuse science, or at least psychoanalytical insight, with the study of contemporary history.