[Constructing one's own history].

Abstract

Constructing one's own history is a necessity for each subject in order to be able to think about and to invest oneself in a reality, external as well as psychic, that will, for the most part, remain unknown. It will then come as no surprise that the appropriation of the kind of self knowledge derived from psychoanalysis comes up against issues proper to history. Nonetheless, it does not follow automatically that psychoanalytical theory can borrow models from the historical method and knowledge. For, while in treatment this is said, heard, understood, repeated, and finally disappears into limbo, the historian, for his part establishes, writes, and embalms in the temple of Mnemosyme. And, despite his theoretical positions in the matter of subjectivity in historical writings, it is nonetheless the case that the collective facts so created by the historian's account are of an altogether different nature than the infantile and singular individual history that the psychoanalyst and the analysand must deal with. The conceptualization of auto-historization in psychoanalysis involves a different activity than that of the historian, but nonetheless, in the form of metaphor or of suggestion, the reference to history haunts the Freudian text and probably every psychoanalytical thought process whether or not one is aware of it.