[Psychoanalysis between archeology and history]

Using the Freudian metaphor of psychoanalysis as archeology, we can identify several "archeologies" in the past of psychoanalysis: in the activities of non-analysts who, as practitioners, dug into the past of Freud, and of analysts who, as laboratory scientists, limited themselves to assembling concepts. We then compared these heterogeneous archeologies, be they scholarly, commonplace, or even scandalous, to the practice of the history of psychoanalysis initiated by Freud and continued by his disciples. The hagiography and more generally, the secrecy that surrounded certain parts of Freud's life and certain of his theories were demolished by the arrival of non-analyst historians, little concerned with preserving the aims that psychoanalysis, for self-preserving reasons, kept alive despite its ideal of a lack of purpose. The analysts, mediocre archeologists in the field, were compensated by their science of assembling piecemeal ideas. On the other hand, in the role of historian, of those who recount, the analysts were not well served by their techniques, coming as they did from the field of psychoanalysis. Thanks to this four-way comparison, archaeologist analysts, non-analyst archaeologists, analyst historians, and non-analyst historians, we can attempt to sketch several conclusions for a methodology of the psychoanalytical history of psychoanalysis.