Understanding History’s Impact: Or, How to Avoid Reading the Present Onto the Past

Abstract

This essay addresses some of the challenges involved in accounting for history’s impact on psychological development. First, I consider how the personal beliefs and theoretical assumptions of psychoanalysts and historians can limit their understanding of other people, whether in the past or the present. Second, I examine the degree to which an individual’s perception and understanding is always a reflection of the collective cultural understanding in which that person lives. I apply these two observations to the discussion of how European Jewish psychoanalysts responded to the traumas of the Holocaust in the decades after World War II. I suggest that individual responses were shaped by the absence of a collective discourse about the Holocaust during this time. When examining the past, I maintain that psychoanalysts and historians should be cautious, lest their current theories determine their understanding of the past.

Keywords:

• collective understanding
• German-Jewish
• historical context
• Holocaust
• reductive theorizing
• trauma