The Impact of Psychoanalytic Training on My Work as a Historian
Thomas A. Kohut, Williams College
It is difficult for me to define the impact of psychoanalytic training on my work as a historian because of my family background. I grew up in what can only be described as a psychoanalytic atmosphere. My father was the well-known analyst, Heinz Kohut, and my mother, Betty Kohut, was a social worker who had psychoanalytic training in Vienna during the 1930s. Most of my parents' friends were psychoanalysts, and I grew up knowing many of the leading analysts of the 1940s-1960s, some of whom were only one step removed from Freud (e.g., his daughter, Anna). As a result of this background, I came to formal training already familiar with psychoanalytic ideas and with a psychoanalytic outlook -- the assumption that human beings can be understood if one adopts the appropriate empathic perspective.
From the outset I planned to have formal psychoanalytic training. I did so for two reasons. First, given the controversial status of psychohistory in the 1970s, I wanted to enrich and legitimate my psychohistorical work with an extensive and systematic psychoanalytic education. Second, given the uncertainties of the academic job market, I wanted the option of becoming a lay analyst.
It was my exposure to clinical material -- in case conferences, my clinical practice, supervision, and my own training analysis -- that proved most illuminating and influential. Indeed it was that experience which revealed to me the limits of theory or, better, its place as a tool in the psychoanalytic enterprise. Less a compendium of universal laws forming the basis for a general human psychology, psychoanalytic theory now seemed more an effective way of transmitting clinical experience. Because an analyst can have direct clinical experience only with a relative handful of people, theory exposes the analyst both to a much larger number of patients and to the knowledge and experience of colleagues, past and present, who have worked with them. By making us attentive to issues we might otherwise have missed, theory in the clinical practice
of psychoanalysis facilitates empathic understanding but never should substitute for it. Indeed, I regularly observed in clinical case conferences that when an analyst employed abstract, theoretical formulations during a case presentation, she invariably did not understand the experience of her patient. The single most important lesson I learned was the centrality of empathic understanding in psychoanalysis, as the therapist thinks her way inside the psychological world of the analysand and imagines why, given his experience, it makes sense that he feels, thinks, and acts as he does.
As a clinical discipline, psychoanalysis thus seemed fundamentally compatible with history to me, since both attempt to achieve empathic understanding of the other -- the one in the present; the other in the past – a point I tried to make in the article "Psychohistory as History" published in the American Historical Review in
1986. As a result of my clinical experience, I think I am less theoretically oriented than I might otherwise
have been and I try harder to immerse myself in the experience of my historical subjects. Like a good psychoanalyst, I try to listen more to the people I study than I do, say, to Freud.
It has been 13 years since I completed my psychoanalytic training and clinical work to come to Williams as a professor of history. Over that time my identity as a psychoanalyst has steadily diminished to the point where I now feel myself to be more or less completely a historian. Yet, I remain a historian, indeed, a person, with
a psychoanalytic world view. As a result of my personal background and formal training, psychoanalysis is something I have internalized. It is an essential part of who I am.
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