This article focuses on the profound psychological impact that history has on human beings, an impact that psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapists have tended until recently to overlook. Specifically, it considers the intolerance of psychoanalysts toward heretical ideas and colleagues as an unconscious response to anti-Semitic persecution, the failure to address pervasive experiences of loss and guilt in psychotherapy in Germany after the Second World War because these were overwhelming for both patients and therapists, the fact that individuals and families have only recently been able to confront National Socialism in Germany as “lived history,” the move from Freud’s predominantly intrapsychic universe to self psychology, which opens up space to view the self as shaped by a historically-constituted environment, and, finally, the impact of the Holocaust on my father, Heinz Kohut, and on his development of self psychology.