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The paper examines an analogy between the role of history in the public domain of social change and the role of personal history in psychotherapy. I argue that in both cases a liberating effect is achieved by “demythologizing the present,” that is, reframing the present as a contingent rather than a necessary outcome of the past. The concepts of necessity and contingency are given a new characterization. The idea is that contingency (necessity) increases in direct (reverse) proportion to sensitivity to initial conditions.
The analogy grew out of my reading of Foucault. It suggests how his historical writings, which are basically descriptive, could come to bear on our normative sociopolitical thought. I claim neither that Foucault's work is unique in its therapeutic potential,
Dr. Ben-Menahem is Director, Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
This paper is dedicated to the memory of my friend and colleague Amos Funkenstein. I gratefully acknowledge Hanina Ben-Menahem for his helpful comments and Nessa Olshansky Ashtar for translating the manuscript from Hebrew.
nor that Foucault is fully conscious of the analogy. Yet I do argue that Foucault formulates his ideas in language congruent with the therapeutic model, and that his education and intellectual commitments sustain the idea that he in fact transferred certain insights from psychology to history. Further, the therapeutic analogy provides a way of meeting some objections to Foucault's handling of the relation between the normative and the descriptive.