Read on Twitter
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& #39;s "Next Assignment" at the society& #39;s annual gathering, this time at the Statler Hotel in New York City.
For Langer, that next assignment involved deciphering how the mind& #39;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& #39;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& #39;t help but observe how trauma, denial, and projection play out in real time. It& #39;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)
