Why Psychoanalytic History?

Some years ago during a discussion period following a lecture I had given, a disgruntled psychoanalyst remarked, “We're not interested in history. We're interested only in theory.” I was stunned. How can one really understand the theory without understanding something about the course of its development?

During the past fifty years the most innovative, the most exciting, the most challenging history has been in the field of psychoanalysis. Why should that be? At one point—perhaps eighty or ninety years ago—if a historian were to be asked what the most influential force within the next century would be, he might well have answered, “Marxism.” So much for prescience. Communism has fizzled out like a spent candle, whereas psychoanalysis, whilst inevitably transmsogrified from its original form, has undoubtedly been the most pervasive ideology in the history of ideas during the past hundred years.

Historians love challenges, and psychoanalysis has provided plenty of these. The concepts are difficult enough to tease the brain of any scholar, and there are so many competing concepts that one can never speak with any authority on only Sigmund Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Heinz Kohut, or Karen Homey without knowing a good deal about other leading figures. I once heard an eminent psychoanalyst boast that he could speak six psychoanalytic languages. I do not doubt for a minute that he could, although I am aware that many of his colleagues have regarded such eclecticism as suspiciously dilettantish.

Frank Sulloway, who is not a great enthusiast of psychoanalysis, nevertheless once remarked that Freud's greatest contribution lay in the interesting questions he raised. It is these questions or assumptions, and the responses and counter-responses, that have created the turbulent history of psychoanalysis. What a cast of characters! What a battle of the titans! Think of the struggle between those two giants, Freud and Jung. Think of that complex relationship bet