Ellman and Galdi's contributions in this volume made me think about the subject of writing history that increasingly is becoming a focus of interest of mine.
There seems to be a subtle shift in writing the history of persons, thought collectives or social issues from a different lens. A central element in this style of writing, to my understanding, is the fact that it goes beyond being a documentation of the development of important, novel ideas or social changes in a vacuum. The stance includes other human elements that partly initiate or shape these controversies. Intellectual, political climate of the times, individual predilections, group dynamics of ordinary daily life that center around jealousy, allegiances, attachments etc. Half a century ego Brian Bird was making an oblique reference to some aspects of this phenomenon as transference being a most important ego function that also shapes creativity. (Bird 1972)
The other central element of this stance is, the history is written from the moment it was happening, rather than history as a retrospectively constructed, linear, inevitable development to our moment where we have the ultimate, developed theory or whatever is under scrutiny. Thus, added to our customary approaches like determinism, relatively unexamined paradigms, such as the role of randomness, chance, will, decisions, choices, and creativity enter the picture.
From my personal interest on processes and periods of personal or social change, two examples that fit this style of history writing are the works of Avineri and Gewarth, both from our neighboring disciplines in social sciences (Avineri 2019, Gewarth 2020).
In sum, it is a multifaceted history that is worked out laboriously and meticulously. A history devoid of simple causes, teleological linear developments, simple generalities. Quite similar to what we aim to achieve in our daily psychoanalytic work, one may say.