History and Psychoanalysis

Freud wrote little about history, in the sense that professional historians understand that term, or about its relationship to psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, three remarks are in order.

From the outset, Freud posited psychoanalytic investigation as being linked to the reconstitution of the patient's personal history. The aim was to restore this history to patients, with the goal of helping individuals emerge as the subject and agent of their own history through the lifting of the repressions that weighed it down, and breaking the pattern...