Historicism

Historicism in the depth-psychology corpus occupies a contested but indispensable position, functioning simultaneously as a methodological resource and an ideological target. Eliade mounts the most sustained critical engagement, arguing that historicistic philosophies — from Dilthey and Rickert to Marx — intensify what he calls ‘the terror of history’ by confining meaning entirely to immanent temporal realization, thereby stripping archaic humanity’s cyclical escape-routes of their legitimacy. For Eliade, historicism names a distinctively modern pathology, one that Marxism both inherits and escalates by transposing the myth of the golden age from primordial to eschatological time. Auerbach, by contrast, draws on Vico’s historicism as an enabling hermeneutical premise: understanding epochs from within their own organic premises, refusing to judge past formations by alien normative standards, and treating every text as a self-making within the specific dynamics of its social moment. Hillman occupies an intermediate position, deploying historicism instrumentally as one of two methods — alongside archetypal hermeneutics — for gaining critical distance from psychology’s own terminological inheritance. Clarke invokes historicism more briefly as a recognized intellectual tendency against which Jung’s cross-cultural ambitions must be measured. Across these voices the central tension is consistent: historicism either liberates interpretation by grounding it in concrete temporal particularity, or it imprisons consciousness by foreclosing any access to transhistorical or archetypal dimension.

In the library 10 passages

The terror of history becomes more and more intolerable from the viewpoints afforded by the various historicistic philosophies. For in them, of course, every historical event finds its full and only meaning in its realization alone.

Eliade argues that historicistic philosophies, by confining meaning entirely to immanent historical realization, generate an unbearable existential burden that archaic cyclical worldviews had circumvented.

Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis

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These orientations disregard not only historicism but even history as such. We believe we are justified in seeing in them, rather than a resistance to history, a revolt against historical time.

Eliade identifies a contemporary cultural counter-movement against historicism — visible in Eliot and Joyce — as a mythic revolt against linear historical time rather than mere escapism.

Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis

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We have been reflecting about these nomina in two ways: first, by means of historicism; second, by means of the hermeneutics of an archetypal psychology, asking what these nomina mean to the soul. Historicism regards the language of psychology as an expression of a style.

Hillman deploys historicism as one of two methodological instruments for defamiliarizing psychological terminology, treating it as a culturally specific stylistic expression rather than a timeless description.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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Auerbach’s fascination with Vico’s historicism (sometimes called ‘historism’) underwrote his hermeneutical philology and allowed him thus to read texts such as those by Augustine or Dante from the point of view of the author, whose relationship to his age was an organic and integral one.

Auerbach appropriates Vico’s historicism as the methodological foundation for a sympathetic, epoch-immanent hermeneutics that reads authorial consciousness as organically embedded in its historical moment.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis

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When people realize that epochs and societies are not to be judged in terms of a pattern concept of what is desirable absolutely speaking but rather in every case in terms of their own premises … they come to develop a sense of historical dynamics, of the incomparability of historical phenomena.

Auerbach articulates the core historicist principle: each epoch must be understood from within its own premises rather than measured against absolute transhistorical standards.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis

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The origins of German Historism clearly show the impress of the conditions under which it was formed. Justus Möser based his ideas on his penetrating study of the historical development of a very restricted territory.

Auerbach grounds the emergence of German Historism in the sociopolitical fragmentation of Germany, treating the movement as itself a historically conditioned response to specific conditions.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting

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problems which lead ultimately into those tangled issues of historicism, the nature of historical reality and the philosophy of history — because we are not so much writing history as we are writing psychology.

Hillman brackets the epistemological difficulties of historicism to pursue a psychological rather than historical hermeneutics of the soul’s self-understanding through time.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting

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historicism 17, 37, 197; historicity, of human understanding 42–5, 50; history, of ideas 7, 8, 9, 12, 17, 33

Clarke’s index locates historicism as a distinct conceptual node within his analysis of Jung’s hermeneutical engagement with Eastern thought, paired with the broader question of the historicity of human understanding.

Clarke, J. J., Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient, 1994supporting

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Although my own work is not based in new historicist theory, I do share many of the assumptions of the so-called New Historicism: ’1) that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices.’

King positions her methodology in qualified relation to New Historicism, acknowledging shared assumptions about the embeddedness of discourse while maintaining analytical distance from the theoretical framework.

Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003aside

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