Editor's Column: Always Psychoanalyze! Historicism and the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society

Many intellectuals who, like those of us involved with APCS, want their work to promote social justice view historicism as an essential weapon in their battle against injustice and oppression. When socially committed critics began two decades ago to speak out against the looming hegemony of what they perceived to be the apolitical and hence conservative positions of structuralist and deconstructive modes of literary and cultural analysis, historicism was the banner under which they united. During the past two decades, such critics, taking advantage of historicist disciplinary and curricular structures that have continued to dominate the humanities, have largely succeeded in displacing their apolitical, formalist opponents, with the result that historicism continues to be hegemonic in literary and cultural studies. Fredric Jameson's slogan “Always historicize!” first uttered at the beginning of the previous decade, now goes without saying in many quarters and goes almost without question in all.

While there has been some questioning of various historicist assumptions and procedures, there has been relatively little inquiry concerning the human consequences, psychological and social, of historicism as such. Forgotten is Hayden White's observation (now thirty years old) that “it is worth askin … why the past ought to be studied at all and what function can be served by a contemplation of things under the aspect of history, [i.e.,] why we ought to study things under the aspect of their past-ness rather than under the aspect of their present-ness” (48). For the past decade at least, the answer to this question has seemed obvious: we need historicism either to provide people (ourselves or others) with a sense of identity or to help them escape the narrow confines of their present identities and become more appreciative of otherness and difference (see Southgate).

To what degree are such claims justified? And how do the proces