Close-Ups

When it comes to the personal history of individuals the question is one not merely of what kind of distance is preferable, but of what kind of distance is possible, meaning how much distance people must put between themselves and their pasts in order to remain psychically viable: which very often, as Freud showed, is no distance at all. Individuals with traumatic pasts (which, to a greater or lesser degree, is everyone), Freud demonstrated in his case studies, are driven to obsessively repeat traumatic scenarios. Having at once too much and too little distance from their past and, most notably, from their childhoods, they – that is all of us, to some extent – cannot become historians of their own lives, since they cannot allow any psychic gap, the space of symbolization and memory, between past events and present experiences. The past is lived as the present. It is this resistance to history-making that acts to shape fantasies about historic distance. Yet there are also those who treat themselves as historical actors in order to stave off the intolerable intimacy of presentness. What would it be like to be ‘successful historians of our own lives’?

Political science · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Diverse academic research themes · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

• The “Shadowy Underside” of Learning History

  Lisa Farley•The Review of Education Pedagogy…•2007

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