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The recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making.
On 27 March 1907, the Psychological Wednesday Society devoted one of its regular evening meetings to the problem of somnambulism (sleep-walking). Isidor Sadger's paper on the subject was followed by a lively discussion, and the concluding remarks were made by Freud who took the opportunity to tackle the mechanism by which fantasy is used to fill gaps in the memory. Among the individuals who seek to escape the anxieties of the present by resorting to the supposed certainties of the past, Freud mentioned three groups that evening: lovers (who cannot stand the idea that the present state is a new one and soon believe they somehow knew each other long, long ago), hysterics (who may replace the auto-erotic fantasies of their childhood with fantasies of seduction), and historians—those professionals who project the observations of their time and transfer them to the past (Nunberg & Federn 1962).
It is not merely for the sake of paradox that I am opening this brief juxtaposition of history and psychoanalysis with a scene from the early history of psychoanalysis (in spite of the admittedly unappealing allusion to historians as somnambulists). Reading Freud's remarks at that meeting, one wonders how someone who had written more about historical and literary figures than about living patients could voice such a disparaging statement on the historian's craft. And yet, the same Freud who expressed this view on history writing has done more than most modern historians to change our conceptions of history and memory and their interrelatedness. Was he not the first to explain why, despite all efforts at objectification, and regardless of the most meticulous source criticism and methodological competence, human