Abstract
This stimulating set of chapters needs no summary here, but it does present an opportunity for some general reflections on the relation between psychoanalysis and history What is or should be this relation? To what extent was Freud’s view of the psyche shaped by his own position in time (1856–1939), space (Moravia, then Vienna), and society (the Jewish professional middle class)? Were individuals in earlier centuries “‘prepsychoanalytic’,” as Stephen Greenblatt has suggested?1 How seriously should we take Freud’s ideas about history, culture, and society? Is psychoanalysis (as Barbara Taylor asks) an aid to empathy, or, on the contrary, a means to distanciation from the past (as Adam Phillips suggests), or can it be both? Can historians learn to understand the past either by studying Freud’s writings or should they, like Peter Gay, undergo an analysis themselves? Do some of Freud’s followers, including the heretics—Jung or Horney or Lacan, for instance—offer more plausible solutions to some of the problems that he raised? Is eclecticism (especially a critical eclecticism) preferable to orthodoxy? Can the psychoanalytical method be adapted from the diagnosis of patients to the study of texts and images? Is there a method at all, or would it be better to speak of intuition?2
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Notes
S. Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture,” in P. Parker and D. Quint, eds., Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Cf. Hodgkin in note 10.
On Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life as an example of the use of details as clues, see C. Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues (London: Verso, 1990).
Contrast M. Shepherd, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Dr Freud (London: Tavistock, 1985).
J. Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919; English translation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), especially 1–29.
L. Febvre, “Histoire et psychologie” (1938) and “La sensibilité et l’histoire” (1941): rpt Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953), 207–238.
Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation (1939), English translation The Civilizing Process (revised edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
The interview quoted in Elias, Au-delà de Freud (Paris: La découverte, 2010), 7–8.
E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951).
J. H. van den Berg, Metabletica (1956), translated as The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to a Historical Psychology (New York: Norton, 1961).
E. Erikson, Young Man Luther (New York: Norton, 1958).
W. L. Langer, “The Next Assignment,” American Historical Review 63 (1958), 283–304, at 284.
B. Mazlish, ed., Psychoanalysis and History (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963).
R. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1965).
Z. Barbu, Problems of Historical Psychology (London: Routledge, 1960).
E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).
A. Besançon, “Histoire et psychanalyse,” Annales E. S. C. 19 (1964), 237–49. Cf. id., Le Tsarévitch immolé: la symbolique de la loi dans la culture russe (Paris: Plon, 1967).
G. Devereux, “La psychanalyse et l’histoire: une application à l’histoire de Sparte,” Annales E.S.C. 20 (1965), 18–44.
A. Besançon, “L’inconscient,” in J. Le Goff, ed., Faire de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), vol. 3.
B. Mazlish, “What is Psycho-History?” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 21 (1971), 79–99.
M. de Certeau, La possession de Loudun (Paris: Julliard, 1970); “Psychanalyse et histoire,” rpt Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 97–117.
S. Friedländer, Histoire et psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1975).
L. DeMause, ed., The New Psychohistory (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1975).
H.-U. Wehler, “Zum Verhältnis von Geschichtswissenschaft und Psychoanalyse,” Historische Zeitschrift 208 (1969), 529–554; cf. id., “Geschichte und Psychanalyse,” in his Geschichte als Historische Sozialwissenschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf, 1973), 85–123.
J. Barzun, Clio and the Doctors (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974);
Stannard, Shrinking History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
F. Manuel, “The Use and Abuse of Psychology in History,” Daedalus (1971), 187–210.
F. Weinstein and G. M. Platt, “The Coming Crisis in Psychohistory,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1975), 202–238.
C. E. Schorske, “Politics and Patricide in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,” American Historical Review 78 (1973), 328–347.
D. Hunt, Parents and Children in History (New York: Basic Books, 1970).
P. Greven, The Protestant Temperament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
S. Friedländer, L’antisemitisme nazi (Paris: Seuil, 1971).
J. Delumeau, La peur en occident (Paris: Hachette, 1978).
T. Zeldin, France 1848–1945, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973–77), later retitled A History of French Passions; Certeau, La possession de Loudun.
P. N. Stearns and C. Z. Stearns, “Emotionology,” American Historical Review 90 (1986), 813–836.
C. Z. Stearns and P. N. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
P. N. Stearns, Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1989).
P. Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, 4 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984–98).
H. Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy (Paris: Seuil, 1987).
L. Passerini, Mussolini imaginario (Rome: Laterza, 1991); id., Europe in Love, Love in Europe (New York: Berghahn, 1999).
L. Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
W. M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), offers a framework for future histories.
Collective studies include C. Benthien Anne Fleig, and Ingrid Kasten. eds., Emotionalität: Zur Geschichte der Gefühle (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000).
P. Gouk and H. Hills, eds., Representing Emotions (Aldershot: Palgrave, 2005).
K. Herding and A. Krause Wahl, eds., Wie sich Gefühle Ausdruck verschaffen: Emotionen in Nahsicht (Berlin: Driesen, 2007).
J. A. Steiger, ed., Passion, Affekt und Leidenschaft in der frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005).
L. B. Namier, Charles Townshend: His Character and Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959).
E. Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul (New York: Knopf, 2004).
P. Gay, The Education of the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 7.
M. Schapiro, “Leonardo and Freud,” Journal of the History of Ideas 17 (1956), 147–178.
J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
A. Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: Beck, 1999).
David Blight, “The Memory Boom: Why and Why Now?” in P. Boyer and J. V. Wertsch, eds., Memory in Mind and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 238–251.
J. Peneff, “Myths in Life Stories,” in R. Samuel and P. Thompson, eds., The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 1990), 36–48.
G. Duby, Les trois ordres, ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1978).
R. Briggs, “Witchcraft and the Early Modern Imagination,” Folklore 115 (2004), 259–272.
L. Roper, “Witchcraft and the Western Imagination,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 16 (2006), 117–141.
D. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain c1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
M. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
J. Le Goff, “Les rêves dans la culture et la psychologie collective de l’occident médiéval,” Scolies 1 (1971), 123–130, English translation in his Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 201–204.
R. Koselleck, “Terror and Dream,” in his Futures Past (English translation Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1985), 213–230.
Cf. P. Burke, “L’histoire sociale des rêves,” Annales E.S.C. 28 (1973), 329–342.
D. Pick and L. Roper, eds., Dreams and History (London: Routledge, 2004).
R. Po-chia Hsia, “Dreams and Conversions: A Comparative Analysis of Catholic and Buddhist Dreams in Ming and Qing China,” Journal of Religious History 29, (2010) 223–240.
K. Hodgkin, M. O’Callaghan, and S. Wiseman, eds., Reading the Early Modern Dream (London: Routledge, 2008).
C. Beradt, Das Dritte Reich des Traumes (Munich: Beck, 1966).
G. E. von Grunebaum and R. Caillois, eds., The Dream and Human Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
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© 2012 Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor
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Burke, P. (2012). Afterword. In: Alexander, S., Taylor, B. (eds) History and Psyche. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137092427_17
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