ABSTRACT
Catching his foot on a stone in the road his lover would soon ride down, Freud’s Ratman felt obliged to move it but almost immediately felt obliged to put it back. The question of the relation between history and the process of the unconscious, between ideology and phantasy, like Ratman’s obsessive stone, is something we seem unable either to resolve or forget. There are two approaches to the issue, one from the side of history, the other from the side of psychoanalysis.
