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IRP 4:305-315 (1977)

Why Psychoanalysis Needs the Social Scientist and the Historian

Author: Peter Loewenberg

I

If—which may sound fantastic today—one had to found a college of psychoanalysis, … analytic instruction would include branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine and which the doctor does not come across in his practice: the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion and the science of literature. Unless he is well at home in these subjects, an analyst can make nothing of a large amount of his material.
FREUD (1926)
Whether or not the psychoanalysts have found the means to rescue [those whose consciousness is corrupt] or to save those in whom this evil has advanced less far, their attempt to do so is an enterprise that has already won a great place in the history of man's warfare with the powers of darkness.
R. G. COLLINGWOOD (1938)

There are many areas of convergence and complementarity between the modes and assumptions of the historian and the psychoanalyst which have been neglected in the usual concentration on differences and oppositions. The aim of this essay is to discuss the congruences between the disciplines of history and psychoanalysis, not to elaborate on their obvious differences. Interdisciplinary work in psychoanalysis has stressed psychodynamic insight into the humanistic and social sciences. Nearly four decades ago the anthropologist Edward Sapir (1951) wrote his seminal essay, 'Why Cultural Anthropology Needs the Psychiatrist'. In this important statement, written in 1938, he said:

Culture cannot be accepted as anything more than a convenient assemblage, or at best total theory, or possible modes of behaviour abstracted from the experienced realities of communication, whether in the form of overt behavior or in the form of fantasy. … We cannot thoroughly understand the dynamics of culture, of society, of history, without sooner or later taking account of the actual interrelationships of human beings. … It will be the future task of the psychiatrist to read cause and effect in human history (pp. 575–6).

The manifold c

IRP 4:305-315 (1977)

Why Psychoanalysis Needs the Social Scientist and the Historian

Author: Peter Loewenberg

I

If—which may sound fantastic today—one had to found a college of psychoanalysis, … analytic instruction would include branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine and which the doctor does not come across in his practice: the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion and the science of literature. Unless he is well at home in these subjects, an analyst can make nothing of a large amount of his material.
FREUD (1926)
Whether or not the psychoanalysts have found the means to rescue [those whose consciousness is corrupt] or to save those in whom this evil has advanced less far, their attempt to do so is an enterprise that has already won a great place in the history of man's warfare with the powers of darkness.
R. G. COLLINGWOOD (1938)

Culture cannot be accepted as anything more than a convenient assemblage, or at best total theory, or possible modes of behaviour abstracted from the experienced realities of communication, whether in the form of overt behavior or in the form of fantasy. … We cannot thoroughly understand the dynamics of culture, of society, of history, without sooner or later taking account of the actual interrelationships of human beings. … It will be the future task of the psychiatrist to read cause and effect in human history (pp. 575–6).

The manifold c