ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis and history have long had a vexed relationship. This article traces that relationship through three interrelated domains: The way an attenuated form of transference structures the relationship between the historian, archive, and historiography; Herbert Marcuse’s deployment of Freud’s speculative histories in order to develop a theory of history that turned repression and liberation as an effect of the abolition of repression; and an exploration of sexual difference and sexuality at the conjuncture of psychoanalysis and history. Taken together, the three sections advance an argument concerning the relationship between desire and history. Moreover, the chapter argues that psychoanalysis offers a compelling analytic frame through which to apprehend a foreclosed historical reality and that it is in this register that history and desire come together. The conjunction of psychoanalysis and history suggests that all history is, perhaps, the history of sexuality as conceptualized by psychoanalysis. Such an approach aims to set off a renewed effort at writing psychoanalytically informed history, one distinguished from earlier efforts at psychohistory. In doing so, the article finds its grounding in the feminist readings of Jacques Lacan, which have offered the most profound engagements with sexual difference.
