Dissociation and the Question of History: “What, Precisely, Are the Facts?”

In the wake of interest in the issue of the knowability of history and the rise of clinical and theoretical interest in dissociation, contemporary psychoanalysis continues to struggle with the basic question of what exactly constitutes a “fact” in the psychoanalytic process. This article considers this difficulty in light of the interpenetration of these two issues—dissociation and the question of history. A brief review of the prevailing alternative viewpoints on dissociation reveals how the question of history—the traditional controversy between narrativist and positivist views—re-emerges from it. This is further born out through a rereading of S. Freud's (1918/1955) most famous case of clinical dissociation, the “Wolf-Man” case, in which, as R. May (1990) showed in his critical analysis, the knowability of history emerged as the central problem. An alternative epistemological point of view on the problem of history is then presented that sheds light on the nature of a “fact” in psychoanalysis. This view enables a relational research paradigm for the empirical investigation of the psychoanalytic process.