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Forcing psychoanalysis out of mainstream historical scholarship (it was never terribly popular regardless) was one of the biggest mistakes the discipline made 1980-2010 prove me wrong
In 1957 the President of the American Historical Association, William Langer, addressed himself to history's "Next Assignment" at the society's annual gathering, this time at the Statler Hotel in New York City.
For Langer, that next assignment involved deciphering how the mind's cognitive and emotive drives have shaped the past and present.
I read this speech and other missives like it for a scrapped project on "psychohistory," a diverse subfield of academic history often in conflict its more materialist and "empirical" siblings.
I still smile at the profound irony that psychohistorians fully believed they were practicing real and tested empirical scholarship.
Since its peak in the 60s, after the publication of Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther, psychohistory has all but died out. And as mentioned, my project died out, too.
But I look around now at my life and others, and can't help but observe how trauma, denial, and projection play out in real time. It's hard not to conclude that a history of a place and time requires a psychology of that place and time as well.
(this is the reason you should follow me @re_colston)
