On Psychoanalysis as History*

There are various ways of dealing with the relationship between psychoanalysis and history, for there is much common ground between the two disciplines. Psychoanalysis, as we know, has its own philosophy of history. It is to be found primarily in the works which Freud wrote during the last phase of his life, say from Totem and Taboo in 1913 to Moses and Monotheism in 1939. We now have a considerable body of literature on this subject, chiefly by “outsiders,” i.e., sociologists and philosophers, and I will not add anything to this discussion.1

Another link between the two disciplines is the use of psychoanalysis in history. Thus a few years ago, a distinguished historian startled his professional colleagues in a presidential address delivered before the American Historical Association by pleading seriously that a “deepening of the historical understanding” was possible only through a more extensive use of psychoanalysis.2 Freud himself was surprisingly reluctant about applying psychoanalysis to specific problems and personalities in history. In a very thoughtful letter to Arnold Zweig, he explicitly warned against doing this sort of thing in the case of Nietzsche.3 And while he did play the game of analyzing historical figures in his letters, he did not do so in his official works—with one notable exception: the as yet unpublished study of Woodrow Wilson which Freud wrote in collaboration with William Bullitt.4

Again, I will not say anything else on this interesting and difficult