Freud and Interpretation

There has been, in the interpretive disciplines, what theologians sometimes call a 'flight from history'. Freud's approach to psychoanalysis was fundamentally historical, and founded on assumptions—so secure that they were hardly recognized as such—deriving from nineteenth-century geology and biology. By adhering throughout his life to a Lamarckian theory of evolution he was able to find a phylogenetic basis for the fantasies of the individual, and to supply gaps in a personal history from the history of the species. Very different views of the relation of past to present were circulating during Freud's lifetime; but he remained faithful to the principle that one best explains how things are by explaining how they came to be that way.

That type of explanation was abandoned in linguistics, and eroded in biblical criticism and art history; but the 'flight from history' in psychoanalysis hardly began to happen until after the death of Freud. It is now quite commonplace to deny a genuine relation between what happens in analysis and what happened in the past. Consequent alterations in the scientific status of psychoanalysis, in its relations to other practices and to general theories of interpretation, are briefly described and considered.