Abstract
This chapter explores the historical aspects of human subjectivity, and the subjective elements of historical understanding. It opens with a critique of what I regard as an over-historicised concept of subjectivity common within the Humanities, and then goes on to argue that historical understanding involves an empathic connection between the historian and her human subjects, a connection made possible by the species similarity between individual subjectivities across place and time.
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Notes
References to individual works are given here; for an overview of the field in the late 1990s, see Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997).
The “self” that is the object of the historiography is, however, far from clearly defined, partly for the reasons that I explore here. For a useful discussion of this in relation to recent histories of selfhood during the Enlightenment and revolutionary period, see Gregory S. Brown, “Am ‘I’ a ‘Post-Revolutionary Self,’” History and Theory 47 (2008), 229–248.
I am here reproducing a summary account of the arguments that I made in “Separations of Soul: Solitude, Biography, History,” American Historical Review 114.3 (2009), 640–651.
The story is told in scores of books and articles; for summary statements of it, see M. Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self (London: Polity Press, 1997), 14–24.
Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self. Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2004), xi-xviii.
Nikolas Rose, “Assembling the Self,” in Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), 224–248.
Charles Taylor’s monumental Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) is also a history of the cultural formation of the psychological self, although in this case with origins stretching back to Augustine and neo-Platonism.
Linda Orr, “Intimate Images: Subjectivity and History—Staël, Michelet and Tocqueville,” in Frank Ankersmit and Hans Keller, eds., A New Philosophy of History (London: Reaktion Books, 1995), 106.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 387.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 49.
Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Jacques Derrida, ed., Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 15.
J. Seigel, The Idea of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 631–650.
Later Derrida revised his views somewhat, cautioning that it might not be possible to dispense with a residual subject; see “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in E. Cadava, ed., Who Comes after the Subject? (London: Routledge, 1991), 96–119.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 4, 256.
John Toews, “Linguistic Turn and Discourse Analysis in History,” in N. J. Smelser and P. B. Baltes, eds., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences (Oxford: Elsevier Science Ltd, 2001), vol. 13, 8920.
As Patrick Joyce puts it, “Meanings make subjects and not subjects meanings.” (Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 13.
For the elision between the linguistic turn and the cultural turn, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ed., “Introduction,” in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (New York: Routledge, 2005), 8. This volume is a very useful collection of articles by some of the key proponents and critics of the linguistic turn.
Quoted in Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 83.
For a discussion of Foucauldianism as a revamped social determinism, see Gareth Stedman Jones, “The Determinist Fix,” History Workshop Journal 42 (1996), 19–35.
Joan W. Scott, “Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Joan W. Scott, ed., Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 165.
For a thoughtful discussion of the politics of the linguistic turn, see Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line. From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), chapter 4 (“Reflectiveness”).
The essays collected in Spiegel, Practicing History, give the flavor of the arguments, while Spiegel’s “Introduction” provides a thoughtful assessment of their long-term significance. For a lively expression of regret for the fading of these intellectual passions, see Susan Pederson, “Festschriftiness,” London Review of Books 33.19 (October 6, 2011), 31–32.
A key dissenting voice has been that of Lynn Hunt, who criticizes the linguistic/cultural turn for having “effaced” subjectivity “as a meaningful conceptual category”: “[T]he self has been reduced to an entirely constructed, and therefore empty and wholly plastic, nodal point in a discursive or cultural system. Since poststructuralists and postmodernists have celebrated the ‘death of the subject’ they have left little in the self to resist social or cultural determinations” (Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, “Introduction,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture [University of California Press, 1999], 22). Hunt is a proponent of psychoanalytical history, but many historians who are not have also criticized constructionist views of the self for obliterating personal agency: David Gary Shaw, e.g., writes that “the self as articulated in much [poststructuralist] historical theory is so divested of autonomy and control that it can’t really operate as a cause, an agent … “ (“Happy in our Chains?,” History and Theory 40 (2001), 4).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975).
For an insightful discussion of Foucault’s complex relationship with psychoanalysis, see Joel Whitebrook, “Against Interiority: Foucault’s Struggle with Psychoanalysis,” in Gary Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 312–347.
By “Lacanianism” I am here referring not just to the work of Jacques Lacan but to the many varieties of poststructuralist French psychoanalytic thought, all of them strongly influenced by Lacan, that came to the fore in the 1970s and 1980s. The relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis, Foucauldianism, and Lacanianism is so complex that it has given employment to a veritable army of scholars, whose publications are so many and diverse that selecting a “representative” sample is not possible. However, those wishing to know more might consult Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso Press, 1987).
David Macey, Lacan in Contexts (London: Verso Press, 1988).
Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory after May 1968 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Company: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990).
Lynn Hunt, “Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Historical Thought,” in Lloyd Cramer and Sara Mazah, eds., A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 337–356.
Daniel Pick, “Psychoanalysis, History and National Culture,” in David Feldman and Jon Lawrence, eds., Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 210–236.
Peter Burke, “Freud and Cultural History,” Psychoanalysis and History 9.1 (2007), 50–15.
Mark Salber Phillips, “Rethinking Historical Distance: from Doctrine to Heuristic,” History and Theory 50 (December 2011), 11.
Ibid., 11–23. See also Mark Salber Phillips, “Distance and Historical Representation.” History Workshop Journal 57 (2004), 123–41.
Mark Salber Phillips, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Sentimental History for Life”. History Workshop Journal 65 (2008), 49–64.
Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History (London: Routledge, 1991), 39–47.
The most lively debates around the historical uses of empathy, in recent decades, have occurred in the context of the teaching of history in schools. I do not discuss these debates here as the pedagogical issues involved are beyond the scope of this chapter, but for some interesting contributions, see A. K. Dickinson, P. J. Lee, and P. J. Rogers, eds., Learning History (London: Heinemann, 1984).
Richard Harris and Lorraine Foreman-Peck, “Stepping into Other People’s Shoes: Teaching and Assessing Empathy in the Secondary History Curriculum,” International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research 4.2 (2004), 1–14.
Ibid., 135; Karsten R. Stueber, “Empathy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008): http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empathy.
Lauren Wispé, “History of the Concept of Empathy,” in N. Eisenberg and J. Strayer, eds., Empathy and Its Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 25–32.
Samuel Moyn, “Empathy in History, Empathizing with Humanity,” History and Theory 45 (2006), 397–415.
George Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT: revised edn 1983).
Karsten R. Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 10–15.
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, revised edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 215.
Arnold Toynbee complained that Collingwood’s brand of history “squeezes out the emotions” (Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Fifty Key Thinkers on History [London: Routledge, 2000], 41).
Fred Inglis, History Man: The Life of R G Collingwood (New Haven, CN: Princeton University Press, 2009), 224–225.
In fact, as Peter Loewenberg has pointed out, Collingwood’s examples of thought reenactment made many references to the use of the imagination (Peter Loewenberg, “Cultural History and Psychoanalysis,” Psychoanalysis and History 9[1] [2007], 21).
R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 218.
Freud’s first use of Einfühlung was in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, where he used it to adumbrate a theory of comedy based on an “inner imitation” of the humorous responses of others; he later went on to describe empathy between the analyst and analysand as the precondition for an effective psychoanalytic treatment (George W. Pigman, “Freud and the History of Empathy,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76 [1995], 244–246).
Heinz Kohut, The Search for the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1991).
Joanna Field [Marion Milner], On Not Being Able to Paint (Los Angeles: Jeremy P Tarcher Inc, 1957), 84, 143–144.
Lewis Ward, “Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Narratives: Towards a Theory of Transgenerational Empathy,” DPhil dissertation, University of Exeter, 2008, 59, 61.
Carolyn Dean, The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 9–10.
S. V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 17–23.
Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 212–213.
Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity and Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 76.
I say “appears to be” because his discussion of subjectivity is exceptionally hard to follow. John Toews, in his review of the book for the Journal of Modern History (78[3] [2006], 684–686), also remarks on this lack of clarity.
Donald Winnicott, Home is Where We Start From (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), 117.
Donald Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (1965; London: Karnac Books, 2007), 90.
See also Arne Johan Vetlesen, Perception, Empathy and Judgement (Penn: Pennsylvania University Press, 1994).
For an account of empathy as the basis of moral judgment, which utilizes Winnicott’s ideas along with other psychoanalytic theorists. Today empathy has moved into the sphere of “social neuroscience,” with many researchers exploring the neurological basis of other-oriented emotions (see Jean Decety and William Ickes, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy [Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2009]).
D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971; Harmondworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 116; author’s italics.
Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 82; author’s italics.
Frank E. Manuel, “The Use and Abuse of Psychology in History,” Daedalus 100.1 (1971), 222. Manuel’s essay is a thoughtful and provocative investigation into the uses of psychology in history since the eighteenth century; the words here quoted are extracted from the following observation: “Classical psychoanalysis, with a dubious future as a therapy, might be reborn as a historical instrumentality. The dead do not ask to be cured, only to be understood.”
Jean Starobinksi, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 14 (1966), 83.
Fernando Vidal, “Jean Starobinski: the History of Psychiatry as the Cultural History of Consciousness,” in Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter, eds., Discovering the History of Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 144. In a fascinating essay on the relationship between subjectivity and historical understanding in the work of Staël, Michelet, and Tocqueville, Linda Orr describes this ceaseless movement between the historian and his/her historical subjects as a “constantly renegotiated, painfully critical, passionate exchange,” a “self-searching” that becomes a source of historical insight. Orr notes the strong anxiety this arouses in many present-day historians, who fear the charge of subjectivism, and against this fear she quotes Michelet: “The historian who … undertakes to erase himself while writing is not a historian at all” (Orr, “Intimate Images,” 106–107).
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© 2012 Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor
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Taylor, B. (2012). Historical Subjectivity. In: Alexander, S., Taylor, B. (eds) History and Psyche. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137092427_10
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