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This is a very important, profoundly moving book, translated, excerpted, and revised from a much larger German book of 1998. I find it hard to do justice to its richness and multiplicity of dimensions.
It starts off with two very thoughtful, more general essays—editor Jürgen Straub's systematic introduction, “Psychoanalysis, History, and Historical Studies,” and Aleida Assmann's “Three Memory Anchors—Affect, Symbol, Trauma.” They deal with two broad groups of questions. Straub asks how psychoanalysis can be useful for the study of history, and what pitfalls may be encountered in applying analytic thinking, experience, theory, and method to historical research, while Assmann deals with problems of memory and forgetting, asking questions like What are the “psychological mechanisms that work against the general tendency toward forgetting, rendering some of our memories more unforgettable than those that sooner or later slide into oblivion”? (p. 19).
Straub mentions in particular (I am being selective) the value of psychoanalytic considerations in two areas of historical research: (1) the deepened understanding of the lives of individuals who have a determining effect on history: “Psychoanalysis provides (more or less) general theoretical terms that make it possible to extend analysis of decisions and actions based on a biography beyond the subjective experiential background of historians, expanding upon a traditional hermeneutics that would exclusively attempt to reconstruct the actor's ‘subjectively intended meaning’ to a methodologically regulated depth hermeneutics …, making it possible to look behind the scenes at the self-imagery and perceptions of a personal cognitive environment, and thereby rendering hidden motives perceptible” (p. 2). (2) Psychoanalysis can contribute to a deeper