HISTORIOGRAPHY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE – SIGMUND FREUD’S AND ROBERT GRAVES’S VISIONS OF HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
HISTORIOGRAPHY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE – SIGMUND FREUD’S AND ROBERT GRAVES’S VISIONS OF HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

Summary/Abstract: On its way to professionalisation, history availed itself of many intellectual achievements from both the sciences and the humanities. And, even though history originates from the “Arts of Poetry”, its drawing on the humanities has been of a restrained character. Much as Darwin’s theory of evolution has been popular with historians, psychoanalytic and literary advances seem to have been of lesser regard for historians and historiographers. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that both Sigmund Freud’s and Robert Graves’s repetition-oriented takes on history and historiography might be read as counter-proposals to the Heideggerian/ Nietzschean interpretation of history and historiography. With this end in view, I contrast the Heideggerian/ Nietzschean vision of repetition-focused history and historiography with those offered by Graves and Freud. In the conclusion section, I pinpoint the implications arising from the idea of history drawing on achievements of psychoanalysis and literature.

• Details
• Contents