Ego Psychology and the Historian

Abstract

From the standpoint of methodological puritanism historians have always lived in sin, loosely cohabiting with a variety of mistresses from theology to sociology. Historians have drawn on other fields for metaphors, data, categories, and explanations, yet whatever they have borrowed they necessarily have made over in their fashion to suit their own terms and purposes. With proper pride they have refused the role of being mere field-hands for other explainers, self-appointed overseers on the plantation of knowledge. This point is often puzzling to social scientists, who are sometimes tempted to complain that historians have no specific subject or method and that therefore their manners should be more humble. For their part, historians are likely to be particularly on guard against presumed friends who offer them methodological help in the form of disguised contempt for the historian's alleged dependence on a primitive common sense. Properly understood, his common sense is at its best a recognition of the nature of documentary reasoning and of the particular kind of focus that historical questions bring to bear on evidence. At its worst such common sense is only another name for ignorance and fear of the unfamiliar, an unearned and inflated professional pride that masks an anxious fear for a threatened status in an academic world in which other subjects currently have more prestige. It is not always clear whether the best or the worst motives are operative because they may be deeply entangled together. The present condition of this historian's ordinary attitude toward psychoanalysis is an important case of this problematic mixture of motives; it needs careful discrimination for the sake of highlighting the genuine methodological issues at stake. I shall plunge into this thicket as an intellectual historian with an interest in both philosophy and psychoanalysis and a recent experience of collaboration with a psychiatrist.