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There are two types of history: narrative and analytic. (Actually there are many more variations but stick with me for a moment.) The narrative tells us the story of what happened; the analytic, provides an account of why it happened. Clearly the first is also analytic, to tell a tale you have to have a theory of the ‘why’; and the analytic is also narrative, as it needs to spin out for us what happened to give us a scaffold for the ‘why.’ This is an obvious way of understanding the craft of history. It is a field with a range of methodologies and each methodology generates specific notions of evidence and proof. Decades ago Hayden White pointed out that narrative history has specific great overarching structures, he called them metanarratives, and Dominic LaCapra showed how analytic history often undermined its own use of narrative. I am beginning with this Cliff Notes summary of historiography because the writing of the history of the ‘psy’ sciences, including psychoanalysis, has not always ‘got this.’
Here we have two major studies, one, a narrative history of mind, and one, an analytic history of politics and/in psychoanalysis, that both ‘get it.’ George Makari is an MD psychoanalyst who is also a brilliant historian. His first book Revolution in mind was without a doubt the most