The relationship between history and psychoanalysis has always been a bit vexed. Joan W. Scott has written of the “incommensurability of history and psychoanalysis,” which “provides the ground for continued conversation and debate about the possibilities, and also the limits, of a collaboration between the different temporalities of psychoanalysis and history” (2012, 82). If there is a trajectory of possibilities and limits that might propel critical historical thinking, there are also dangers. Michel de Certeau, himself one of the great practitioners of a psychoanalytic history, put it this way:
Since these Freudian “concepts” are supposed to explain all human endeavor, we have little difficulty driving them into the most obscure regions of history. Unfortunately, they are nothing other than decorative tools if their only goal amounts to a designation or discreet obfuscation of what the historian does not understand (1988, 288-89).
Another advocate of a psychoanalytically inflected history was less circumspect. “My plea for history as an elegant, fairly rigorous aesthetic science,” Peter Gay wrote in Freud for Historians,
was powerfully assisted by my commitment to psychology, in particular to psychoanalysis. I saw it then, and see it even more now, as a rewarding auxiliary discipline that the historical profession has so far inadequately trusted, and certainly far from mastered. The much canvassed disasters of psychohistory, on which its detractors have fastened with a kind of unholy glee, are ground for caution rather than despair—or for disdain (1985, ix-x).
Taking these cautions seriously, we might still ask, what was/is psychohistory? What has the discipline of history lost by effectively disavowing it? And what might this mean today for the teaching of history in the United States (and elsewhere), as the university itself crumbles?
Continue reading “The Disavowal of Psychohistory and the Teaching of History”