Abstract
The humanities and psychoanalysis both generate skepticism from a culture ever more suspicious of enterprises that cultivate a tolerance for ambiguity and a recognition of ambivalence. Neither the humanities nor psychoanalysis can thrive in an environment so reductionist that it pursues measurement at the cost of imagination. Historical consciousness, at the core of the humanities and psychoanalysis, resists this reductionism. The practice of historical inquiry, of making meaning from the past, will never eradicate ambiguity and ambivalence. This essay will explore the connections between psychoanalysis and history beginning with Freud’s work, and then consider the impact of psychoanalysis on the approaches to the past taken by historians in more recent years. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)