Martin Klüners

Please note that this is an automatic software translation which may contain errors. Interestingly, parts of the German-language Lehnsbriefe from the 13th century were also translated into English by the software. The original editions can be requested from the author.

The sciences of the soul, psychology and psychoanalysis, are in a kind of middle position between the natural sciences and the humanities - because they generally study the human being as a physical-spiritual 'hybrid being'. Consequently, they are particularly affected by the fundamental discourses in scientific theory about the different ways of knowing "explaining" and "understanding". Psychoanalysis, in particular, exhibits clear features of a hermeneutic discipline. For its part, the hermeneutic method is inseparably linked to a school of thought that was influential for the most part in Germany, for which the names of Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-1884) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) are representative. The most radical representative of the hermeneutic 'school', however, was not a German, but the British philosopher and archaeologist Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943), whose work, which for a long time received little attention, has enjoyed a renewed reception in recent decades. His relationship to psychology and psychoanalysis will be examined in the following. In the process, striking parallels will be revealed, especially to psychoanalytic thought. Like Freud, with whom he shared a passion for history and archaeology, Collingwood was convinced that the past keeps its power alive in man.

This essay is devoted to the diary Alexander Mitscherlich wrote during his trip to America in 1951 at the invitation of the Rockefeller Foundation. The main focus is on Mitscherlich's image of America. The question is investigated to what extent traditional old European, educated bourgeois reservations and modern Westernizing tendencies are mixed together in the detailed descriptions of his experiences and impressions. Until well into the 1930s, Mitscherlich was under the influence of a clearly anti-American intellectual milieu, before his attitude changed in the course of passive resistance to the Nazi regime and, especially in the immediate post-war period, he cultivated friendly contacts with the occupying power and even took an active part in the Westernization project of American and German intellectuals. A brief overview of his intellectual socialization against the background of the history of the German image of America therefore serves as an introduction to the study of Mitscherlich's travel notes.

For decades, an essay of the same name by the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler was decisive for the relationship between historical science and psychoanalysis, at least within Germany and on a theoretical level - with the fatal consequence that Wehler's argumentation was guided by the highly contestable assumption of an exclusive relationship between psychoanalysis, which allegedly proceeds purely in terms of individual psychology, and historical social science, which is primarily interested in collective diagnoses, which considerably impeded the dialogue between the disciplines. Yet an alternative theoretical model was already available at the time Wehler's essay was published: Norbert Elias's sociology of figuration, which was strongly influenced by psychoanalysis and group therapy, could have shown social science-oriented historical research a way to investigate the network of relationships between individual and 'collective' psychological processes without artificial dichotomies. Admittedly, Elias's theory of civilization, for its part, does not sufficiently take into account the moment of a collective or social unconscious. Therefore, after a critique of Wehler's critique and an appreciation of Elias's model, this essay is devoted to those approaches that attempt to explore and conceptually define a supra-individual unconscious.

Was macht den Menschen aus, seine »Natur«
oder seine Geschichte? Seitdem er sich nicht
mehr in eine gottgegebene Ordnung eingebettet
weiß, denkt der Mensch über kaum eine andere
Frage mit derartiger Inbrunst nach. Die Geschichtsphilosophie
definiert ihn als vornehmlich
historisches Wesen und fragt folglich nach
Sinn und Ziel der Geschichte. Die Anthropologie
hingegen sucht nach dem Unveränderlichen,
immer Gleichbleibenden im Menschen. Dabei
scheint die Geschichtsphilosophie an einem
unvollständigen Menschenbild, die Anthropologie
an ihrem unhistorischen Charakter zu
scheitern. Gibt es keinen Ausweg, noch eine
Möglichkeit der Vermittlung? Doch, denn die
Psychoanalyse betrachtet nicht nur die Natur
des Menschen als fundamental geschichtlich,
sie begreift den Menschen gleichsam als von
seinem Unbewussten, seiner Triebnatur geleitet.
Diese implizite Dialektik von Natur und
Geschichte könnte dem Menschen helfen, sein
Wesen und seine Geschichte realistischer als
bisher zu bestimmen.
Schlüsselwörter: Natur, Geschichte, Anthropologie

Arthur C. Danto can be seen as the founder of a new narrative philosophy of history that
connects epistemology with literary theory. His work provoked other important narrative
theories dedicated to the relations between literary and historical theory as those of Paul
Ricoeur and Hayden White. Sigmund Freud’s early narratives of case, especially that of
Elisabeth von R., tell non-fictional, „historical“ facts with literary methods and allow to
examine the development of psychoanalysis from the narrative point of view, using the
theories of Danto, Ricoeur and White.