Historiography 101 for Psychoanalysts

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Notes

The word is used also to mean simply the collected historical writings of a group, time period, or discipline, as in Western historiography, Middle Ages historiography, or psychoanalytic historiography. In contrast this paper explores how histories are put together in any era or ways they account for a particular discipline. An early Wikipedia entry suggested that a more appropriate term for this “how” question might be historiographology, but, that term failed to achieve lexical traction and newer Wikipedia entries no longer propose it.

White (1990) notes that the philosopher Georg Hegel felt that “‘the only thing that anyone learned from the study of history is that no one ever learned anything from the study of history’ … [but] … that one could learn a great deal, of both practical and theoretical worth, from the study of the study of history.” p. 82.

This case was also described in another paper (Abrams, 1996) to illustrate the nonhierarchical partnership in the analytic situation.

Ernst Kris (1956) cautioned analysts about patients arriving with explanatory coherent histories that are experienced as true. He was attuned to the defensive nature of such narratives and to the more significant underlying fictive feature, the “personal myth.”.

Originally so described by Cicero. He was also called the “father of lies,” in Arabian “Abu Goosh,” because of willfully deceiving his audience. Persian Journal, (2007).

Cartledge, (2006), p 214–15.

Thucydides may have been more scholarly, but, in believing that history was the recording of the political and military adventures of important men, he had a far narrower scope.

Another example: Roger Chartier asserts that “[history’s] … narrative constructions aim at reconstructing a past that really was.” Iggers, 1997, p. 12.

Two recent histories of the United States often cite similar data but arrive at entirely different views of America’s past and ongoing values (Zinn, 2003 and Schweikart and Allen, 2004).

Herodotus cited the poet Pindar: ” … custom is king of all.” (Strassler, p. 224).

Buhle (1998, p 175) noted the views of certain wartime scholars that ” … psychopaths like Hitler or Mussolini, ‘standing before the bar of historical judgment, might often well begin their defense with the words: “I had a mother … ”’”.

See, for example, Zaretsky (2004).

White calls them products of allegoresis. (1990a, p. 45), saying one thing but meaning another.

Hence, an old technical maxim was to always interpret with conviction.

Abrams, S. (1995).

Hayden White: ” … A narrative account is always a figurative account, an allegory” (1990a, p 48) and ” … history… can be put together in a number of different and equally plausible narrative accounts of ‘what happened in the past’, accounts from which the reader, or the historian himself, may draw different conclusions about ‘what must be done’ in the present.” (1973, p. 283).

It is obvious that White is knowledgeable about psychoanalysis. His chapter on the tropic elements in Freud’s dream-work should be part of any serious study of The Interpretation of Dreams’ Chapter VII (White, 1978, 6:101–124).

See Erikson (1956), for example.

The interweave between the political and academic may be demonstrated in the interests and works of the British historian G. R. Elton. (Evans, pp 165–203) in Elton (2002).

One of the more spectacular historical examples is Blaise Pascal’s aphorism “If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the face of the world would have been changed.”.

White notes that it is a feature of the secondary revision of Freud’s dream-work. (1990b, p 106).

Also see Jenkins’s definition of history (2002, pp 31–32) as “a shifting, problematic discourse ostensibly about … the past … but which … correspond to a range of power bases … that exist at a given moment.” This definition may be applied with little modification to case reports that characterize contemporary psychoanalytic “schools.”.

Wilson (1998) offers this descriptive view of the discipline that may prove congenial for many analysts: “History is best defined as a continual, open-ended process of argument, which is constantly changing. No question is closed because any problem can be reopened by finding new evidence or by taking a new look at old evidence. Thus there are no final answers, only good, coherent arguments: history is not some irreducible list of ‘the facts’ but continually changing bodies of evidence.” (p 3).

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Notes on contributors

Samuel Abrams

Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, NYU Institute, New York University Langone School of Medicine.