Traumatic Reliving in History

Psychohistory came out of psychoanalysis and is still working its way free from an all-too-long infantile dependence. This macro fact fits my own micro case to a T. My first book was a triple biography innocent of any and all psychologizing. It was not yet off the press when, while teaching cultural history, I studied Freud and converted. My first Freudian writing was a brief analysis of a Kafka story. Next came a major Freudian project: a life of Freud's friend and disciple Lou Andreas-Salomé. Although a literary personality in her own right, Lou was known above all for her strong personal impact on Nietzsche and Rilke before her association with Freud. I intended to reconstruct her inner and outer development on her own late-life Freudian terms with the help of her copious letters, diaries, and memoirs. This intent miscarried fruitfully. For one thing, the deeper I dug into her papers, the more it emerged that even in documenting herself incessantly her whole life long she had been playing free and loose with her past—with her recollections and records alike. Her self-version was, then, no shortcut to her inside story, but a maze of biographic snares. Initially I saw the great source of her fanciful self-accounting, as also of her abundant fiction proper, in the almighty father complex to which she had owned up in a late-life tribute to Freud: on this construction, she was at bottom forever claiming to have been her father's pet. But then, just to break the oedipal monotony and thicken the plot harmlessly, I took to probing her fiction for its referents in her adult experience as well. This led me at length to her fictional referent of all referents and thence to her factual fib of all fibs. Her fictional referent of all referents came first: at the climax of a sizzling cerebral encounter with Nietzsche in her youth as his self-willed disciple he had told her off and cast her off in a raw rage for loose talk about him to his family and friends. Her factual fib of