From Depth Psychology to a History of Sensibility : An Intellectual Genealogy

The history of sensibility still continues to elicit suspicion, first and foremost because this intellectual project remains poorly defined, historiography often having led us to believe that its roots stemmed solely from Lucien Febvre's endeavours and the French history of mentalities. And yet in truth, the history of sensibility is nothing less than the historiographical translation of a much broader and older philosophical movement, born of the tipping point provoked by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Those great sceptical thinkers taught us to unmask the role of desires, appetites and impulses behind our ideas, reason and consciousness In addition to recreating the historicity of our lives of sensibility and thus rendering man less transparent to himself, the historian of sensibility aims to re-evaluate the role of affect in the shaping of human behaviours. To do so, we must reply on the rich constellation of critical knowledge developed in Germany during the first half of the 20th century, termed ``social'' or ``historical'' psychology, or in a Nietzschean fashion, ``depth psychology''.