Between Memory and Desire: From History to Psychoanalysis and Back

Abstract

At the turn of the nineteenth century, when the Freudian paradigm took its first steps towards becoming a modern amalgam of science and hermeneutics, history was considered the most established and instrumental discipline in man's quest to endow his thinking and action with meaning. The kinship between the disciplines, which could be traced back to the persona of Freud, took many shapes in the course of the twentieth century. Examined in perspective one could maintain that modern historiography and psychoanalysis have travelled the same distance in moving away from philosophical idealism, have shared some of the illusions of militant positivism and are accustomed to evoke the same criticism due to their claim to half-scientific, half-artistic epistemology. We start by considering the intellectual legacies and theoretical foundations that shaped the two disciplines' perspective of each other. We then proceed to juxtapose several historical moments in the evolution of psychoanalysis and history. Turning our attention to several key concepts and tropes, which form part of the contemporary objectivity-subjectivity discourse, we try to sketch an outline for a psychoanalytically-informed theory of history.