ja P a Book Reviews 61/2 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HISTORY

This is a very important, profoundly moving book, translated, excerpted, and revised from a much larger German book of 1998. I find it hard to do justice to its richness and multiplicity of dimensions. It starts off with two very thoughtful, more general essays–– editor Jürgen Straub’s systematic introduction, “Psychoanalysis, History, and Historical Studies, ” and Aleida Assmann’s “Three Memory Anchors––Affect, Symbol, Trauma. ” They deal with two broad groups of questions. Straub asks how psychoanalysis can be useful for the study of history, and what pitfalls may be encountered in applying analytic thinking, experience, theory, and method to historical research, while Assmann deals with problems of memory and forgetting, asking ques-tions like What are the “psychological mechanisms that work against the general tendency toward forgetting, rendering some of our memories more unforgettable than those that sooner or later slide into oblivion”? (p. 19)