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In this paper we offer a brief history of writing about psychoanalysis' history. We argue that both psychoanalysis and historical writing about it were shaped crucially by the early schisms within psychoanalysis, by Freud's death, and then the diaspora of European psychoanalysis, a trauma history which precipitated a fragmentation or dissociation. We have noted how psychoanalysts have tried to master that trauma with history-writing, and, at certain moments, with a degree of historiographical consciousness. But, we note, psychoanalytic history-writing kept regressing into biography writing, memorializing, or criticizing Freud himself, not the science, and we offer the judgment that even the more historiographically conscious history-writing of the last few years has not yet made psychoanalysis a discipline with a history. It is our assumption that psychoanalysis needs, like a traumatized individual, to be able to tell reflectively the story of the group trauma.
No one who is concerned with psychoanalysis as a theory, a practice, and a cluster of local, regional, and international educational and scientific institutions would dispute that psychoanalysis is, today, in a profound crisis. The most obvious symptom of this crisis is comparable to the symptom most studied by contemporary psychoanalytic investigators of trauma, that is, dissociative fragmentation, loss of identity. There are now many versions of psychoanalytic theory; practitioners with