History, Emotions, and Psychoanalysis: Theoretical Explorations

Abstract

This article offers the first steps toward a theoretical and methodological approach to the History of emotions. As the title suggests, it brings History into dialogue with Psychoanalysis to design – through a critical yet, we hope, productive encounter – a coherent and robust framework for addressing the problem of emotions in historical inquiry. Our aim is not only to locate the unconscious within History but also to model a way of working with past subjectivities and agencies that disrupts the unrealistic projection of an indivisible individual closed in upon themselves, and underscores the irrelevance of drawing a boundary between the interiority and exteriority of human experience.

Keywords: Psychoanalysis, historiography, History of emotions, desire, interiority-exteriority, emotions