Keeping Our Distance

Abstract

When the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott wrote, in 1959, that “the psychoanalyst can be looked upon … as a specialist in history-taking,” and went on to say that “this history-taking is a very involved process,” he was saying several things at once, some startling and some not, and some perhaps of interest to the historian as well as to the psychoanalyst.2 The traditional history-taking of the medical specialist involves the asking and the answering of a series of pertinent questions with a view to appropriate treatment. The purpose of this oral history, which then becomes written history in the form of the patient’s “notes,” is clear: it doesn’t, as a psychoanalysis sometimes does, take many years, and it doesn’t include the prescription that the patient should say whatever comes into his head, without regard for narrative coherence. And, of course, in medicine history-taking is a prelude to and a precondition of the treatment. What Winnicott was saying was that the psychoanalyst was a specialist in history-taking because the treatment of psychoanalysis was an extended history-taking. The history-taking— that becomes, of course, a history remaking—is the treatment. The question then becomes—and it was a question not initiated by Freud, but followed up by Freud from a confluence of selected nineteenth-century historiography and the then contemporary psychiatry—what is it that history-taking treats? And how does the taking and making of history work, involving as it does in psychoanalysis the making (and breaking) of links between the past and the present?

It may be all right morally but there is a serious and rather ordinarily mysterious sense in which life in the present is constantly in thrall to its ever-ongoing outcomes and is continually reshaped, too late, by what contingently it leads to.

—Philip Davis, Why Victorian Literature Still Matters¹