Inter-disciplinarity in history and psychology: from the “courts of impotence” to impotence as an internal conflict

Abstract

Psychology and history are perfect bedfellows, since the present and the past come together in the psychoanalytical scientific method. On the psychoanalyst’s couch or in the social setting, the present is invaded by the past through the daily routine, literature, morals, law, language, science, technology, the arts. With the purpose of illustrating the inter-disciplinarity of history and psychology, two views of sexuality are discussed: the first refers to an extreme externalization of impotence, based on the judgment of those who are impotent; the second view selects the internalization of guilt, by means of the transformation of the legal procedures incriminating the impotent subject in internal conflicts. Thus, the visit to history stands out, in the search for victims of the courts,
in the service of the repression of the disabled, and the visit to the fundaments of the patients’ history in the search for ways to suppress the mental repression that disabled them.