The relations between history and psychoanalysis in France are both tenuous and complex, the subject of various developments and characteristic of a number of major intellectual figures. In order to renew the historiographical account of this intertwining, the use of certain narrative devices from psychoanalysis allows us to shift our gaze a little in order to better describe some important moments in this relationship between two disciplines that both attract and repel each other. The relationship between these two disciplines has been troubled, from the history/problem of the Annales, which evacuated psychoanalysis before the Second World War, and the project of historical psychology, which was very influential among historians for several decades, to the more intense links with the history of mentalities and certain remarkable individual intellectual trajectories, right up to the use of psychoanalytical tools to grapple with questions of contemporary memory.