Chapter 18 Psychohistory, Cultural Evolution, and the Historical Significance of Self Psychology

The purpose of this chapter is to show the psychohistorical relativity of psychoanalytic knowledge and the consequences of its nonperception and denial in clinical theory and practice.

Psychoanalysis reaches the proud age of 100 this decade. Since Freud published his Studies on Hysteria in 1895, his baby has become an old lady. Her lifespan is approaching a second turn of the century. This gives me some good reasons to look with you at the problems of psychohistorical change in the last hundred years and at their consequences for psychoanalytic theory and practice. One hundred years of psychoanalysis were of course 100 years in the history of childhood and in the history of upbringing too. We saw 100 years of cultural change in the relationships both between the genders (or sexes) and the subsequent generations. We must realize that this change caused in part by psychoanalysis, also rebounded to have an effect on psychoanalysis itself. What's more, 100 years of psychoanalysis were accompanied by 100 years of change in mental and psychosomatic illness. Above all, however, we had 100 years of economic and social history which more fundamentally transformed the life of the individual, the family, the coexistence of nations, and mankind as a whole than millenia before.