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Psychoanalysis has always struggled with the subject of history. This might be one reason that so many psychoanalysts, from Wilhelm Reich on, have looked with such envy to Marxism. With the dialectic, even the surliest Marxist can explain how a specific instance of human suffering is part of a grander historical narrative. Your victimization is never yours alone, but the victimization of an entire class; your struggle is never yours alone, but part of a multimillennial conflict between freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, bourgeois and proletarian-in a word, oppressor and oppressed.
Meanwhile psychoanalysis has had to keep searching for concepts and techniques that would allow it to make sense of the forces of history within and beyond the consulting room. As we know, Freud experimented with a number of these concepts without ever finding one that quite worked for him. Or rather, he found one that he thought worked-ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny-but even the most orthodox among us have a hard time following him down that particular path. The texts written under the influence of recapitulation theory are often illuminating and always entertaining, but not exactly models of theoretical or empirical rigor.
As a result, psychoanalysis has been cursed to wander the hallways of the human sciences in search of theories that would help it think more clearly about history and its subjects. Not only Marxism, but phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, feminist theory, and queer theory-at one time or another psychoanalysis has entered into conversation with all of them. Consider, for example, how “repression” in its analytic sense was conflated with “repression” in its political sense right up until the early 1980s, when Foucault finally persuaded (most of) us to stop.
If psychoanalysis has trouble with the subject of history, history has even more trouble with the subject of psychoanalysis. The historian Frank Manuel (1971) once re