You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In a famous, or one might even say notorious article, published in the American Historical Review in 1958, the distinguished diplomatic historian William L. Langer challenged, indeed scandalized many of his professional colleagues by suggesting that the 'next assignment' for historians was to take psychology more seriously and to learn from Freud and other psychoanalysts. A generation later, this piece of advice is no longer shocking, at least in the United States, where psychoanalysis has penetrated the culture more deeply than elsewhere. All the same, the meeting between psychology and history is always being adjourned. Even in the 1990s, it remains the next assignment.
Many attempts have been made to bring the parties together. The latest is the volume under review, a collection of thirteen essays by eleven authors, including the historian Peter Gay, the biographer Jean Strouse, the political scientist Robert Tucker, the psychologist Kenneth Kraik, the psychoanalyst Robert Wallerstein, and two men, Peter Loewenberg and Fred Weinstein, who combine historical and psychoanalytical expertise.
Runyan's volume is only the latest of a whole shelf of individual and collective discussions of the relation which obtains or ought to obtain between the two disciplines, including J. H. van den Berg's pioneering Metabletica (1956), subsequently neglected, probably because it is written in Dutch; Zevedei Barbu's Problems of Historical Psychology (1960); the collective volume on Psychoanalysis and History, edited by Bruce Mazlish (1963); the volume on The Psychoanalytic Interpretation of History (1971), edited by B. Wolman; Saul Friedländer's Histoire et psychanalyse (1975); and Peter Gay's Freud for Historians (1985).
However, it may well be significant that the initiative for a rapprochement between the two disciplines usually comes from the side of the psychologists. Only a handful of professional historians (notably Peter Gay) have undergone training analyses in order to wo