On many occasions during the first three decades of my career in some dozen disciplines, I have found myself in the struggle, and occasionally the resolution, of the enigmatic words Beethoven wrote prefacing the final movement of his last string quartet, Opus 135: first, “Muss es sein?” (Must it be?), then,”Es muss sein” (It must be). What for so long seemed—and still seems—to be self-destructive factionalism within psychohistory (as well as in countless other scholarly and clinical disciplines), reveals itself to be “culture” or “group fantasy” in the guise of “science” and “scholarship.” As we are invited to contemplate (once again) the future of psychohistory, I direct our attention in this essay—via retrospection—not only to public and academic attacks from without on the wide and profound legacy of Sigmund Freud, but also to the undermining from within the ranks of those who espouse the psychoanalytic study of society and history. What others may do to us and wish upon us is bad enough; the carrying out of the destruction among ourselves is infinitely sadder.
Howard Stein (Sat,) studied this question.
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