Why Psychoanalysis Has No History

In this paper we offer a brief history of writing about psychoanalysis’ history. We argue that both psychoanalysis and historical writing about it were shaped crucially by the early schisms within psychoanalysis, by Freud’s death, and then the diaspora of European psychoanalysis, a trauma history which precipitated a fragmentation or dissociation. We have noted how psychoanalysts have tried to master that trauma with history-writing, and, at certain moments, with a degree of historiographical consciousness. But, we note, psychoanalytic history-writing kept regressing into biography writing, memorializing, or criticizing Freud himself, not the science, and we offer the judgment that even the more historiographically conscious history-writing of the last few years has not yet made psychoanalysis a discipline with a history. It is our assumption that psychoanalysis needs, like a traumatized individual, to be able to tell reflectively the story of the group trauma.

Introduction

No one who is concerned with psychoanalysis as a theory, a practice, and a cluster of local, regional, and international educational and scientific institutions would dispute that psychoanalysis is, today, in a profound crisis. The most obvious symptom of this crisis is comparable to the symptom most studied by contemporary psychoanalytic investigators of trauma, that is, dissociative fragmentation, loss of identity. There are now many versions of psychoanalytic theory; practitioners with the most diverse sorts of training perform the “talking cure” in the most diverse ways; and many of psychoanalysis’ institutions are unable to integrate themselves or operate as communities even after intensely discussing everything about themselves, starting with: “What is psychoanalysis?” Psychoanalysis is also in a critical relationship with the diverse societies and cultures world-wide where its work is performed and where it competes with other mental health specialties for patients, for resources, for scientific status and control of disciplinary boundaries, and for recognition of its particular qualities and appreciation of its illustrious past, when it grew from a marginal, revolutionary theory and treatment into a main source of all modern mental health specialties. As with individual traumatic experiences, working through the dilemmas of contemporary psychoanalysis is a slow and complex process, mixing advances, retreats, and iatrogenic effects as the doctors try self-doctoring and doctoring of their field.

Psychoanalysis’ fragmentation is, we want to argue, connected to its trauma history, which reached a key culmination point with the death of its founder and organizing force, Freud, in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War and the Holocaust, which generated the diaspora of surviving psychoanalysts mostly to England and to the Americas—a geographical but also a communal fragmentation. Behind this trauma cluster lies a predisposition to traumatization connected to the fact that psychoanalysis was, from its inception, built up out of deep disagreements and internal splits. Each time there was a split, a valuable part-theory disappeared from consideration, impoverishing psychoanalysis and distorting its development. At the very origin of psychoanalysis, Freud sharply disagreed with himself, precipitating a depressive reaction, and decided that actual seduction in childhood was not the sole cause of hysterical neurosis. He responded with his essential initial formulations about the Oedipus complex and the power of unconscious fantasy. But a split between concern for external traumas and concern for unconscious fantasy took place in Freud and in his followers, to the eventual relative neglect of external traumas. After that, there were multiple splits in the early group around Freud in Vienna: Alfred Adler, for example, left, taking very important theories about the ego instincts and about aggression with him; Jung departed, taking with him his concern with spirituality and symbols and his interest in treating psychotics with the talking cure.

The first trauma that Freud himself acknowledged as such was the First World War, about which he said in his “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death:”

We cannot but feel that no event has ever destroyed so much that is precious in the common possessions of humanity, confused so many of the clearest intelligences, or so thoroughly debased what is highest

(1915, p. 275).

His own response was to cut off any consideration...