The inner beings : what converses within us

Abstract

If relations between history and psychoanalysis have long seemed impeded, it's not only because of historians' spontaneous mistrust of a conception of the Freudian unconscious as that " tuf primordial et infantile " of which Alain Besançon spoke, obstructing any attempt at historicization by its very nature, " stable, universal, monotonous ". It's also due to the difficulty of these two disciplines to speak with one another, beyond the lazy, uncontrolled borrowing of an apparently (but falsely) common lexicon. By its very subject - the political history of a hallucination - as by its very form - the epistolary novel of an impossible encounter - the book that Philippe Boutry and Jacques Nassif published in 1985 under the title Martin l'archange pointed to these difficulties. Starting with this book, but going well beyond it - by examining the long history of these misunderstandings since Sigmund Freud's 1939 book L'Homme Moïse et la religion monothéiste  - the speakers at the seminar attempted to confront these impasses, and the paradoxical promises they hold out, not only for the relationship between history and psychoanalysis, but also for the expansion of the historian's questionnaire on inner beings.