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Psychoanalysis seems to have an ambivalent relationship to history. On one hand, exploring and recontextualizing an analysand's history has been central to the analytic process since Freud developed the genetic perspective on human development. On the other hand, the historical/sociocultural world in which psychoanalysis developed, and in which it is embedded, is all too frequently neglected in psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis' ahistoricity has led to at least three deleterious consequences. First, there is often a gap between what has been discovered by psychoanalysts and what is practiced. For example, Ferenczi explored the analyst's contribution to treatment, including countertransference, between 1928 and 1932. The 20-year hiatus between Ferenczi's seminal work and the related work of Heimann (1950) and Little (1951) on countertransference suggests that attention to psychoanalysis' history could have prevented subsequent analysts from neglecting such innovative ideas and hastened the utilization of countertransference as a valuable tool in analytic theory and practice.