This article aims to address, by means of a two-step analysis, the foundations of the relationship between history and psychoanalysis as “disciplinary practices” that deal with the past. In the first step, I examine the different relationships between history and psychoanalysis but also the uses of psychoanalysis in historical approaches. My goal here is to situate the context and the guiding questions. As a second step, I try to show that RicÅ”ur puts forward, in his book Memory, History, Forgetting, a major thesis regarding the foundations of the relationship between psychoanalysis and the hermeneutics of history. By means of the phenomenology of wounded memory, he identifies a fundamental structure of collective existence that provides the basis of this relationship. Finally, I seek to determine the scope of this structure, which takes the form of an originary trauma affecting the collective existence, by drawing an analogy with the psychoanalytic concept of afterwardsness. Keywords: History, Past, Memory, Psychoanalysis, Afterwardsness, Violence
Call for Papers: Studia Phaenomenologica vol. 26 (2026): “Phenomenology and Psychopathology”
Editors: Françoise Dastur and Maria Gyemant Argument: Phenomenology was conceived by Edmund Husserl as the rigorous and objective science of subjectivity. It aims to explore subjectivity in a way far more complete than empirical psychology could ever do since it does...