Dark Traces of the Past

Psychoanalysis and Historical Thinking

Jürgen Straub, Jörn Rüsen

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2011
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781845453992
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

The relationship between historical studies and psychoanalysis remains an open debate that is full of tension, in both a positive and a negative sense. In particular, the following question has not been answered satisfactorily: what distinguishes a psychoanalytically oriented study of historical realities from a historical psychoanalysis? Skepticism and fear of collaboration dominate on both sides. Initiating a productive dialogue between historical studies and psychoanalysis seems to be plagued by ignorance and, at times, a sense of helplessness. Interdisciplinary collaborations are rare. Empirical research, formulation of theory, and the development of methods are essentially carried out within the conventional disciplinary boundaries. This volume undertakes to overcome these limitations by combining psychoanalytical and historical perspectives and thus exploring the underlying "unconscious" dimensions and by informing academic and nonacademic forms of historical memory. Moreover, it puts special emphasis on transgenerational forms of remembrance, on the notion of trauma as a key concept in this field, and on case studies that point the way to further research.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface to the Series
• Psychoanalysis, History, and Historical Studies: A Systematic Introduction
• Part I — Construction of Memory and Historical Consciousness
• Chapter 1 — Three Memory Anchors: Affect, Symbol, Trauma
• Chapter 2 — Origin and Ritualization of Historical Awareness: A Group Analytic View and an Ethnohermeneutic Case Reconstruction
• Chapter 3 — Identity, Overvaluation, and Representing Forgetting
• Part II — Shoah: The Chain of Generations
• Chapter 4 — Transgenerational Trauma, Identification, and Historical Consciousness
• Chapter 5 — On the Myth of Objective Research after Auschwitz: Unconscious Entanglements with the National Socialist Past in the Investigation of Long-Term Psychosocial Consequences of the Shoah in the Federal Republic of Germany
• Chapter 6 — Understanding Transgenerational Transmission: The Burden of History in Families of Jewish Victims and their National Socialist Victimizers
• Part III — Case Studies in Psychoanalysis and Literary Critics
• Chapter 7 — On Social and Psychological Foundation of Anti-Semitism
• Chapter 8 — From Religious Fantasies of Omnipotence to Scientific Myths of Emancipation: Freud and the Dialectics of Psychohistory
• Chapter 9 — Working toward a Discourse of Shame: A Psychoanalytical Perspective on Postwar German Literary Criticism
• Bibliography
• Notes on the Contributors
• Index