Wilhelm Dilthey R.G. Collingwood Marc Bloch
Click Here to Read: Cultural History and Psychoanalysis by Peter Loewenberg . Reprinted From “Cultural History and Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalysis and History, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2007), pp. 17-37. Reprinted with the author’s permission.
Here is the conclusion of Dr. Loewenberg’s article:
Conclusion
There is a congruence of hermeneutic method between cultural history and psychoanalysis which includes a recognition of the subjectivity and self-reflexivity of interpretation; a quest for the latent meanings of manifest artifacts, symbols, and conduct; a recognition of the centrality of emotions in the structuring of motivation and action; the present condition, presenting complaint, pain, or symptom as a key to the past, if only one knows how to read or decode the message; an empathic method of understanding that includes the ability to engage with the cultural, social, and historical assumptions and background of the analysand or the subject; an attention to mini-narratives and the small telling detail that unfolds a larger level of meaning and interpretation.
The purpose of psychoanalysis and the study of cultural history is the same – the expansion of one’s own self narrative and that of our analysands, as in the narratives of our collective historical past from Thucydides and Burckhardt, from slavery and the Bauhaus, to the present. The public benefits from cultural history — from cogent accounts of how humans who lived earlier faced, were shaped by, and sometimes mastered or failed to face, their personal and social conflicts. By recognizing ourselves in the cultural symbols of struggles, triumphs, and defeats of the past, as well as the history of admirable creative efforts, we may derive, as did Freud, encouragement and hope for ourselves and our groups in the present and in the future. Cultural history and psychoanalysis are both quests for personal and cultural meanings and identifications with the experiences of humans in the past, including the non-rational aspects of human existence, as we pursue personal and group creativity.