History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis and the Past

The relationship between psychoanalysis and history is a long-standing, productive, and controversial one. From Freud onward, psychoanalytic thinkers have looked to history for insights into the operations of the human mind. Historians, meanwhile, have been more equivocal about the value of psychoanalysis for their discipline, but the resurgent interest in psychoanalysis across the humanities in recent decades indicates that a reassessment is in order. History and Psyche provides a much-needed new exploration of this fraught intellectual terrain, bringing together essays by sixteen leading scholars across multiple disciplines. The contributions gathered here cover a wide range of topics, from historical subjectivity to the political history of the Oedipus complex to early modern autobiography, making this an invaluable survey of a complex and contested field