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History. —The best way of understanding psycho-analysis is still by tracing its origin and development.
The less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgement of the future.
As a psychology of development, psychoanalysis is history. Psychoanalysts, whatever place their different orientations allocate to explicit reconstructions of past events, concern themselves with the personal history of the individuals who seek them out. Others may not believe that the present is affected by the past, and would not therefore subscribe to the principle of determination (or, more precisely, of overdetermination). They would never consider becoming psychoanalysts or historians in the first place- and will feel instinctively suspicious of both. But it is not to them that we address our Journal—nor to those many who try to murder psychoanalysis by declaring it dead. We believe that elucidating its history is the best way to demonstrate its liveliness.
Those of us who are ready to accept that the causes of current events are to be found through the exploration of past ones also assume an ideological connection between historiography and psychoanalysis. This seems the right time to embark upon such an exploration if we agree with Martin Bergmann (1997) that ‘no generation of psychoanalysts was as well-equipped for the task of re-examining the history of psychoanalysis as ours’ (p. 69). We present our new journal Psychoanalysis and History as an attempt, which we hope our readers will find successful, to examine and strengthen the links between these two disciplines, by using research methodologies that apply to both. While we are clear that the name of our journal is neither The Psychoanalysis of History nor The History of Psychoanalysis, we hope to encompass both projects.
On the one hand, our enquiry will concern historio