Psychoanalytical Perspectives in History: Scope and Boundaries

Abstract

Some recent works in history have used the concept of trauma to illustrate the undecidability of the nature of our historical experience of collective catastrophes and our representations of them. Unfortunately, the use of the psychoanalytical and neurological versions of the concept of trauma misrepresents the social dynamics of collective memory since it was formulated as a category concerning individual people's memories. In this paper, I will only focus on one of the problems involved: the ontological problem. I will argue that the temporality of trauma is incompatible with the temporality of history.