Editorial

It is a truism of psychoanalytic writing on history that the two disciplines are umbilically linked through their concern with the unconscious. This assertion leans on the idea that the task of the historian is often to recover, restore or reconstruct episodes of the social life of the past that have become lost to social consciousness of the present. (A more hermeneutic or post-structuralist reading of this would be that the episodes of social history were never originally ‘present’ - all we have, as in some versions of analytic practice, are competing constructions and reconstructions of what is happening or has happened.) To add a further twist, turning from notional historical ‘events’ to look instead at the accumulating records of cultural and historical observation, the historian's task might be to sift through documents recovering slivers of an archive which has become so vast we can only be aware of tiny facets of history at any one time. All these versions of historical work I've given - and they represent just a few ways of thinking about historiography - could be associated with versions of the unconscious; or perhaps more accurately the pre-conscious, as they conjure up that sense of the voluminous tissue of historical memory lying below and supporting the smaller set of narratives about the past we consciously take up at any one time. Like Freud's pool of more everyday mental associations, the data is potentially accessible and ready to rejoin trains of thought in the present at any one time. One just has to look for it - a search which may begin with random encounters, or from a hunch concerning what is ‘missing’ from our current historical perspective.

But of course the history of psychoanalysis alerts us also to those aspects of historical forgettings and rememberings which seem more motivated than this, although the motive is itself nowhere consciously formulated and