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think, failed to use his historian ' s imagination .
If
he had approached
psychoanalysis not as a single set of ideas produced by one man but
as an intellectual movement which began in a specific milieu at the
end of the nineteenth century and has expanded and developed in
various directions in various countries-and has displayed, like so
many other movements, internal contradictions and divisive ten–
sions-he might have discovered that psychoanalysis has explored
more areas of human experience than are accounted for by Freud's
ego psychology and has produced other clusters of ideas which could
well be of as much if not more use to historians as the one to which
he has restricted himself.
Two in particular strike me as being likely to be of interest to
historians . First , there is the literature which elucidates the origins
and the interrelationships of the various emotions of self-regard and
the sense of identity-raised and lowered self-esteem, pride , shame
and humiliation-emotions which Freud , with his preoccupation
with guilt, did not consider in detail. Fortunately for historians the
best and most illuminating book in this area, Helen Merrell Lynd's
Shame and the Search for Identity,
is the work of an author who, though
well-informed about psychoanalysis, was nonetheless deeply
grounded in literature and history. The psychodynamics of pride
and shame should, it seems to me, be of particular interest to
historians studying nationalism , militarism, chivalry and gentility .
Secondly, there is the psychoanalytical tradition of concern
with depression, despair, grief, mania, elation and ecstasy . This
tradition started with the work of Karl Abraham in the early 1920s
and is at present represented by the object-relations school , which
flourishes in Great Britain and is beginning to attract attention in
the United States. Professor Gay has certainly heard of this school,
since he mentions representatives of it several times , mostly in foot–
notes, but he has not, I think, appreciated the extent to which it
diverges from the phase of Freud's thinking to which he is attached ,
and it seems not to have occurred to him that the psychology of
depression and mania-and such concepts as the depressive position
and manic defense-could be of use to historians in general and of
particular interest to historians of totalitarian, religious and
chiliastic movements.
CHARLES RYCROFT
