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.
Many attempts have been made to outline the links uniting psychoanalysis and history. How did Freud conceive history, and what role did this conception play in his theory of neuroses? This question calls for a preliminary remark. The German word Geschichte means ‘history’ in the sense of science and knowledge of the past, but is also used to refer to all true or false ‘story’.
If one simply spots the uses Freud made of the word Geschichte, it becomes clear that all sorts of histories (case histories, history of the development, of religion, of humanity) are superimposed without cancelling each other out in the course of the texts.
In Freud's correspondence with Fliess we may discover that ‘history’ is synonymous with theory: ‘I am rewriting history as a whole for you’, Freud said to his friend, referring to a common project about actual neuroses.1Between 1892 and 1897, an evolution in Freud's vocabulary may be spotted. The Geschichten (as simple patients’ stories) became a Freudian specific manner of considering the common medical Vorgeschichte2 (meaning the patient's previous history) literally as a Vorgeschichte (a prehistory.) The latter was called ‘Urgeschichte’ (original history) and followed by allusions to prehistory (Prähistorie) and to the original time (Urzeit) of neurosis and childhood.3 It was at the same period that Freud began to organize the elements of the so-called archaeological metaphor. Psychoanalysis was archaeology, Freud dug into the case histories, extracted the pathogenic sexual memory and followed its traces, thus revealing the experience of childhood: the seduction scene. In order to be a prehistorian, Freud became