Patrick H. Hutton

Sigmund Freud and Maurice Halbwachs: The Problem of Memory in Historical Psychology*

SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939) is well-remembered by historians of this generation, but their memories of him are ambivalent. Few scholars today would claim to take Freuds practical work as an historian seriously. His famous study of the origins of civilization, Totem and Taboo (1913), has long since been dismissed as conjectural and refuted by more recent scholarship.1 Yet for most psychohistorians, he is still the grand master for his pioneering model, the point of departure from which they have proceeded in developing this field.2 Nor have historians generally rejected the value of psychoanalytical technique in historical research. Peter Gay for one has shown its enduring value in the ensemble of considerations historians must entertain in their search for a comprehensive understanding of the past.3 Here I wish to take a different tack. I want to evaluate Freud as historian in light of the enormous recent interest in the role of collective memory in historical understanding. To consider Freuds theory from the vantage point of memory illuminates his theory of history in a different way. Indeed, one might argue that Freuds theory of history turns on his theory of memory. In this respect, I wish to judge his interest in history in light of two historiographical perspectives on the memory/history problem.

Mnemonic Schemes in the New History of Memory

Books reviewed in this article: The Memory of the Modern By Matt K. Matsuda Landscape and Memory By Simon Schama

Historical dictionary of the Third French Republic, 1870-1940

[The volume] achieve[s] high marks in scholarship, factual content, organization, and ease of use. Reference Books Bulletin

Book ReviewsRegimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. By François Hartog. Translated by Saskia Brown. European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism. Edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman.New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Pp. xxii+262.

François Hartog has written a stimulating historiographical study at a crossroads where time, memory, and history encounter one another. He analyzes what he characterizes as “regimes of historicity” from antiquity to the present. I take his use of the term “historicity” in the Heideggerian sense: existentially, we are timeful beings. The historiographical interest in its “regimes” lies in the way the relationship among time’s moments—past, present, and future—has been configured differently in historical thinking over the course of time. In this respect, Hartog adopts the long view. His project leads him back to Augustine’s meditation on time in his City of God and even before to Homer’s Odyssey. This excursion into the deep past provides background for his concentrated attention to a new conception of historical time in our contemporary age. Hartog posits three regimes of historicity: the first concerns the history of exemplary lives. Idealizing the past, it dominated historical thinking from antiquity until well into the eighteenth century. The second was modern, dating from the time of the French Revolution. It plotted unique events along a trajectory toward an anticipated destiny. With progress toward the making of a better society in mind, it privileged the future. The third, a regime focused on the present as the primary referent for historical interpretation, emerged during the late twentieth century. With a sense of loosening connections with the immediate past and uncertainty about an indeterminate future, this regime took the present age as a point of departure for historical inquiry. Such is the predicament of our presentist regime of historical time. Hartog is well qualified to undertake this overview. Learned in the cultural history of antiquity, he has written well-conceived historiographical studies of Herodotus and of Denis Fustel de Coulanges, the nineteenth-century historian of ancient Greece and Rome. Given the scope of this venture, there is a way in which the range of his historiographical thinking is reminiscent of the philosophers of history, from Condorcet to Toynbee. But he sidesteps the pitfalls of their speculative determinism by deflecting attention from patterns of actual events to the changing attitudes toward historical time on the part of particular scholars who have commented on the topic. Canvassing all of this is nonetheless a tall order. Hartogmanages the task by singling out historical thinkers who sensed themselves caught in transition between regimes of historicity. In this respect, he devotes a chapter to the memoirs of René de Chateaubriand, who straddled the boundary between ancient and modern regimes in his observations on the nature of history. For the coming of the presentist regime, one might cast Hartog himself in just such a role. His sense of kinship with Chateaubriand is visible in his analysis. Hartog’s references to historiographers who have reflected on historical time in this way are far-ranging and reveal the erudition he brings to this project. Yet I would mention two scholars who are especially important for the development of his interpretation: the Ger-

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Practices of commemoration served as the first topic to attract historians’ attention. I review the theories advanced in the widely read studies by Benedict Anderson on the concept of the “imagined community” and by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger on the notion of the “invented tradition.” These serve as a point of departure for my assessment of four leading studies on national commemorative remembrance: George Mosse on the cult of thee fallen soldier in Germany; Yael Zerubavel on places of memory in the construction of Israeli national identity; Jean-Marc Largeaud on the battle of Waterloo in its idealization in both memory and history; and Jay Winter on the wide array of practices of historical remembrance of World War I. I close with some common denominators in these studies.

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Nearly all of the work in the historiography of collective memory has focused on issues of historical representation. Still, experience remains its existential ground, and the postmodern emphasis on the rhetoric of historical discourse has incited a reactive interest in human subjectivity. Those scholars stressing representation maintain a sober critical distance from their subject matter. Those favoring experience stress vicarious emotional identification with the historical actors of the past, as if it were possible to make them “come alive again.” The latter approach has long been identified with amateur historians, history buffs, and writers of historical fiction. But since the turn of the twentieth century, some professional historians express openness toward the heuristic value of performative modes of presenting the past for drawing a wider public into an interest in history. I review recent historiographical discussion of the nature and significance of this broader understanding of the historians’ enterprise.

The Politics of Commemoration

I set forth the larger historiographical context in which the memory phenomenon is situated. I trace the move in scholarship from the history of collective mentalities during the 1960s and 1970s toward the history of collective memory during the 1980s and 1990s. Mentalities focused on the inertial power of social traditions and hence on their relative stability. Studies of collective memory, by contrast, placed the accent on memory’s fragility. In this transition, one notes a shift from memory as the groundwork of history to memory as the object of the historians’ critical scrutiny for bias and distortion. I close with my plan for the book.

Negotiating the Boundary between Representation and Experience

I relate the memory phenomenon to the shift in late twentieth-century conceptions of historical time from an accent on progress looking toward the future to one on nostalgia for the lost promise of the past. I review the newfound scholarly interest in nostalgia in both modern and postmodern conceptions of its nature. Such scholarship highlights the ambiguity of nostalgia: it elicits bittersweet emotions not only for what was, but also for what might have been. In the latter guise, nostalgia is reconceived as a resource for renewal. I close with the suggestion that the current scholarly fascination with Walter Benjamin’s visionary conception of history is derived from his conception of nostalgia as messianic hope for lost causes and failed projects worthy of revival.

Historiographical Background to the Memory Phenomenon

I explain how the study of the Holocaust of European Jews has shifted since the 1980s from its realities to its remembered legacies. I review a succession of issues about Holocaust memory from the Historians’ Dispute in Germany over the limits of its representation during the 1980s, to strategies of German statesmen to find a symbolic compromise in its official commemorations during the 1990s, to reflections on moral responsibility in the passing of living memory of the Holocaust into written history in our times. I close with discussion of recent work on the globalization of Holocaust remembrance as a historiographical reference in the campaign for human rights in our times.

Nostalgia and the Mnemonics of Time

I contrast the assessment of the state of memory studies by sociologists Jeffrey Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy in 2011 with that of Pierre Nora in 1984. The comparison provides perspective on the reconfiguration of the memory phenomenon during the interim. Initially conceived as a search for the mnemonic sources of a dissolving modern historiography, the study of collective memory has since become an interdisciplinary venture, for some a “new wave” of scholarship in which historians play only a contributing role. In light of this transition in the venue for the study of memory, I revisit the perspective of five historians who have reflected on the enduring value of the historians’ role vis-a-vis this new milieu of scholarship: Rosenfeld, Farge, Darnton, Yerushalmi, and Ricoeur. I close with a recapitulation of the way in which the interest in memory has influenced our understanding of history.