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The history of the psychoanalytic movement will never have come to an end. This is true not only for the banal reason that psychoanalysis continues to evolve and that new chapters in its future development will need to be written. It is also true because the history of psychoanalysis is intractably composite, heterogeneous, and irreducible to the simple linear sequence of a straightforward chronology. Nor does the genealogy of psychoanalytic ideas play out in neat arboreal fashion according to continuous, organically determined lines of development. Each moment in the history of psychoanalysis carries latent significance that may, in recursive interaction with the present, give rise to new versions of the past. A history of psychoanalysis cannot therefore be organized by simple reference to origins, but must account for the social, cultural, and political contingencies that introduce discontinuity, irregularity, contradiction, recurrence, and rupture into the story.
Of course, Freud, in his History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914), is rather anxiously determined to avoid these complications, even to eliminate contingency from the narrative altogether. In a virtuoso political act of remembering, repeating, and working through (the title of his famous essay on technique from the same year), Freud writes his own history of the movement—its beginnings, its expansion, its reckoning with dissent, and its continued growth—in a spirit of willful confidence that psychoanalysis has a single origin and a
continuous history guaranteed by a set of conceptual shibboleths and by an institutional structure charged with enforcing them. “[P]sycho-analysis is my creation” (Freud, 1914, p. 7), he declares at the outset, staking his absolute claim to priority—and later announcing his means for protecting this priority: “I considered it necessary to form an official association . . . some headquarters whose business it would be to declare . . . ‘this is not psychoanalysis’” (Freud