History Flows through Us

Germany, the Holocaust, and the Importance of Empathy

Roger Frie, Roger Frie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351972260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

History Flows through Us introduces a new dialogue between leading historians and psychoanalysts and provides essential insights into the nature of historical trauma. The contributors – German historians, historians of the Holocaust and psychoanalysts of different disciplinary backgrounds – address the synergy between history and psychoanalysis in an engaging and accessible manner. Together they develop a response to German history and the Holocaust that is future-oriented and timely in the presence of today's ethnic hatreds. In the process, they help us to appreciate the emotional and political legacy of history's collective crimes.

This book illustrates how history and the psyche shape one another and the degree to which history flows through all of us as human beings. Its innovative cross-disciplinary approach draws on the work of the historian and psychoanalyst Thomas Kohut. The volume includes an extended dialogue with Kohut in which he reflects on the study of German history and the Holocaust at the intersection of history and psychoanalysis. This book demonstrates that the fields of history and psychoanalysis are each concerned with the role of empathy and with the study of memory and narrative.

History Flows through Us will appeal to general readers, students and professionals in cultural history, Holocaust and trauma studies, sociology, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and psychology.

Part I

Remembering the past

Chapter 1

From psychohistory to memory studies

Or, how some Germans became Jews and some Jews Nazis

Alon Confino

In the 1970s and 1980s historians debated the merit of the relations between history and psychoanalysis. The term of the day was psychohistory. In 1986 Thomas Kohut (1986), a historian and a psychoanalyst by training, published an insightful essay on the topic in the American Historical Review entitled “Psychohistory as History.” He underlined, among other factors, the close affinity between (some of) the practices of the historian and those of the psychoanalyst, both of whom seek to elucidate the subjective experience of their subject using an approach based on empathy, namely trying to imagine and reconstruct how and why the world made sense to their object of therapy or study. These principles received further emphasis in the mid-1980s with the rise of cultural history; historians these days would recognize them as essential to historical investigation. And yet, the discussion over psychohistory among historians rather disappeared at exactly that period. The term itself has today an air of a long-gone era. I read Kohut’s essay as a mid-1980s piece that is both convincing on a certain affinity between history and psychoanalysis, and is also a testament to the way historians have found little use in a continued discussion on their theoretical and interpretative relations. Why, I have asked myself, has this been the case?

I would like in the first part of this essay to reflect on this question. My claim is that history and psychoanalysis had not simply been drawn unbridgeably far apart in the mid-1980s: instead, conversely, historians have adopted in the last generation key psychoanalytic terms such as memory, emotion, and empathy as fundamental topics within the broader field of cultural history, while at the same time they saw no use for psychoanalytic explanations to elucidate the historical investigation of these topics. In the second part of the essay I discuss how historians treat historical memory, first by articulating some of the possible merits in the notion of memory, which has become in the last generation one of the most influential terms in historical explanation and interpretation, and then by telling two Holocaust memory stories.

Between psychoanalysis and cultural history

The relations between history and psychoanalysis seemed traditionally distant and close at one and the same time. The two disciplines ask different questions and focus on different objects of study. Psychoanalysis focuses on the individual, while history attempts to draw general patterns and establish causes for collective motivations and actions. Historians have traditionally eyed with suspicion attempts to impose general psychoanalytic theories on the particularities of historical situations, as well as attempts to explain action in terms of unconscious motivations instead of conscious aims. Karl Mannheim, the eminent sociologist of knowledge, put it in 1937 in words that it is still worthwhile to think about today:

We cannot jump straight from the general observation of individuals and their psychic mechanisms to the analysis of society. The psychology of society is not a million times that of an individual … What for our purpose is needed is an historically-differentiated psychology by which the changes in attitudes, motivations and symbol-transmutations in different periods among different classes and under different social situations will be made plain.

(Mannheim, 1937, p. 129; cited in M. Confino, 1967)

But the attraction of using psychoanalysis to decipher human motivations was also great. In the 1970s and 1980s there had been a growing discussion among historians, building on an earlier body of work, on the merits of psychohistory, as it was called. Interestingly, scholars of the Third Reich and the Holocaust were especially attracted to this topic, sensing that the extermination of the Jews demands certain insights that go beyond the expressed conscious motivations of the perpetrators. Saul Friedlander (1978) attempted a general argument in History and psychoanalysis: An inquiry into the possibilities and limits of psychohistory before attempting to use trauma, transference, and working through to understand the particular history of the Holocaust (Friedlander, 1992). Peter Loewenberg (1987), a historian engaged in clinical practice as a psychoanalyst, provided a psychohistorical interpretation of Kristallnacht and by extension, of the Holocaust.

Kohut’s “Psychohistory as history” provided a refined analysis of the issues at hand. A major point of contention in the debate has been how, if at all, to apply psychohistorical method and theory to understand the past. Kohut insightfully argued that this is the wrong problem to pose: “the application of the psychohistorical method to the past is problematical. It is also unnecessary” (Kohut, 1986, p. 337). Instead, he articulated a set of shared concerns and concepts: “The historian and the psychoanalyst approach their human subjects in essentially the same way and share a common method of understanding … In both disciplines the investigator feels or, perhaps better, thinks his way inside the experience of the other” (Kohut, 1986, p. 344). Distinguishing between sympathy (feeling sorry or experiencing compassion for someone) and empathy, Kohut observes that via the notion of empathy

the investigator puts himself in the place of the other and imagines why – given the time, place, circumstance, and experience of the other – it makes sense that he felt, thought, and acted as he did. In contrast, then, to the psychohistorical method, which relies on theory to provide its understanding and explanation, both the historical and the clinical psychoanalytic approach rely on empathy to understand and explain the particular meaning of human subjects. This fundamental methodological unity makes clear that, in studying the past’s psychological dimension, the historian can remain a historian; he can continue to use traditional historical methods and, in doing so, function in a way that is fundamentally compatible with the way in which the psychoanalyst functions as a clinician.

(Kohut, 1986, pp. 344, 347)

This astute evaluation contains both the reasons for historians’ adopting what Kohut calls “the past psychological dimension” and for their relinquishing of psychohistory. Kohut’s evaluation goes hand in hand with the aims and approaches of cultural history in the mid-1980s. It is interesting that the connection between cultural history and psychohistory is not made in Kohut’s essay, but perhaps this was unavoidable because the essay was written in the early 1980s just before the cusp of cultural history began to emerge in full force. The study of culture has postulated in the last generation that collective representations cannot be reduced to social and political origins. This approach moved away from explanation in terms of functionalist and structuralist models and toward, as the editors of the important French journal Annales put it in a 1989 historiographical statement, “analysis in terms of strategies, which allow memory, learning, uncertainty, and negotiation to be reintroduced to the heart of social interaction” (The Editors of the Annales, 1995, p. 487). Exploring “the world as representation,” to use the title of an essay by Roger Chartier (1995), was ultimately a way to “cast a fresh eye on the social itself” by emphasizing the subjective experience of contemporaries, focusing not only on what happened in the past, but also on what people thought was happening, and how their memory of the past influenced their actions and identity through time. The historian and the psychoanalyst, then, came quite close together in this regard.

Moreover, the procedures of the historian have changed in such a way as to remind one, in some broad respects, of those of the clinical psychoanalyst. It has become a staple of historical work to own a historical past precisely by showing the limits of historical knowledge and the constructedness of historical representation.¹ The historian of the South of the USA Edward Ayers described this shift eloquently in a meditation on the different narrative forms in his book The Promise of the New South, published in 1992, and in C. Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New South, published in 1951. Ayers, a student of Vann Woodward, views Origins as the finest Southern history. During the forty-one years that separated the publication of the two books historical writing markedly changed and became dominated by “a sense of contingency and possibility even within powerful structures … when the authors let the reader in on the way the argument is being constructed … when the appearance of coherence and a commanding argument may ultimately be less useful than a reckoning with the limits of our knowledge or understanding” (Ayers, 1997, pp. 40–41).

And yet, if all these changes brought history closer to psychohistory, they also, on a fundamental level, caused historians to lose interest in psychohistory, and to jettison the term and the controversy around it. I can raise some ideas as to why this happened. Historians are sorts of theoretical and methodological predators, they pick and choose from other disciplines what suits them to explain why things happened and how. I advance the claim that because cultural history shared, consciously and more often unconsciously, with psychohistory key concerns of method and topics of investigation, psychohistory itself – as a mode of explanation, of answering why things happened – provided little specific explanatory reward (Megill, 2007). The tradition of history of mentality, of anthropology, cultural studies, postcolonial and gender studies, and of everyday-life history proved to historians more useful to collect and interpret evidence (Hunt, 1989; During, 1993; A. Confino, 2008).

I would raise the question whether the rise of cultural history in the mid-1980s at all depended on psychohistory. I doubt it. Paying closer attention to memory and the subjective experience of people in the past would possibly have occurred independently of the discussion about psychohistory. Arguably, internal transformations within the historical discipline were more important. Take for example the shift from “society” to “memory” that occurred in historical studies in that period. It began in the early 1980s as a gradual and as yet not brisk shift, measured and not yet revolutionary (Nora, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2001; Anderson, 1991). By the 1990s, however, the notion of “society” – as it had been practiced by social historians throughout the twentieth century and particularly after 1945 – was swept away by the interpretative onslaught of memory and cultural studies. The notion of society, broadly speaking, was based on a linear concept of history developing along one temporal timeline and privileging social and economic topics interpreted in terms of their function and structure. The notion of memory, in contrast, is based on the idea that social groups have a multi-temporal concept of history, they look back and forward at the same time, they commingle past and present, they capture simultaneously different and opposing narratives – because identities always include contradictory elements and because social groups, similarly to individuals, remember the past in order to make sense of the present. To explore this, historians therefore privileged topics of representation interpreted in terms of experience, negotiation, agency, and shifting relationship. “Memory” now governs questions of historical interpretation, explanation, and method in such a way that it seems appropriate to speak of a paradigm shift in historical studies from “society” to “memory.”

Paradoxically, then, historians have changed their explanatory toolbox by borrowing psychological terms such as emotions, sensibilities, empathy, and especially memory, but without following up by using psychoanalytic methods and theories (Forum “History of emotions,” 2010; Assmann and Detmers, 2016). We need to note that historians obviously always considered memory and emotions as important to understand the past (A. Confino, 2011). But something different happened since the mid-1980s because these notions, I would argue, changed the way historians understand the presence of the past and of emotions in the life of people in the past by making it into an essential empirical, analytical, and theoretical tool with which to understand social, political, cultural, even economic phenomena that regularly had been seen as determined by a very different set of factors. In this, historians have become a little bit closer to psychoanalysts than they might wish to admit, while keeping their method of investigation, and collection and evaluation of evidence, at arm’s length from psychoanalysis.²

History, memory, and storytelling

One notion that has brought historians and psychoanalysts closer is memory. On one level, the two disciplinary crafts endow memory with great meaning. But on a different level historians have their own way of exploring the subject. The notion of memory has become in the last generation a sort of totem, a revered notion for public identity and professional investigation. For scholars it has governed questions of interpretation, narration, and explanation (now perhaps less than 20 years ago).

The study of memory explores how a social group, be it a family, a class, or a nation, constructs a past through a process of invention and appropriation and what it means for the relationship of power within society. Of course, social groups cannot remember, for this is only a faculty of the individual. And certainly, people cannot remember events in which they did not take part. Yet you do not need to have stormed the Bastille in order to celebrate July 14 as a symbol of national identity. One’s memory, like one’s most intimate dreams, originates from the symbols, landscape, and past that are shared by a given society. Since the making and the reception of memories, personal and collective, are embedded in a specific cultural, social, and political context, we can explore how people construct a past in which they did not take part individually, but which they share with other members of their group as a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributor biographies
• Acknowledgments
• Historical trauma and lived experience: An introduction
• Part I Remembering the past
• Part II Responding to the past
• Part III Confronting the past
• Part IV Bridging psychoanalysis and history
• Index