Psychoanalysis, Historiography, and Feminist Theory: The Search for Critical Method

Description

In this book Katherine Kearns explores the feminist, theoretical, and psychoanalytic implications inherent in the relationship between history and narrative. She poses a feminist challenge to the hidden assumptions within conventional historiography by focusing on the troubled relationship between subjectivity and history. By applying Freud's theories of how adult authority is forged, especially his notion of the Oedipus Complex, Kearns considers the anti-feminist, anti-individualist implications of any fully oedipalised discourse. While recognising the principle that history always occurs within a shared social context, Kearns explores the disguised positivisms that remain embedded within conventional historiographic procedures, and reveals their implications for feminist discourse. The study of history, she argues, whether literary, political or social, must take us beyond traditionally defined historical contexts to include individual psychological moments and states in which thought and action occur.

'Kearns's book should be studied by all historians, social scientists and those working in the humanities. It is consistently illuminating on the role history and narrative play in historiography and critical theory. It conveys its thought-provoking analysis in a prose of sustained wit and vivacity that will induce even those who criticise its conclusions to enjoy reading its argument.' Dominick LaCapra