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Abstract
Psychoanalysis is often wrongly perceived to be uninterested in history. Yet, as the most comprehensive and sophisticated basis for the exploration of human consciousness, the field of psychoanalysis, from its inception to the present, has continued to offer unprecedented insights into how we perceive, record, and share the complexities of temporality. The aim of this article is to demonstrate, with the help of various works by Walter Benjamin—works in which his attunement with psychoanalytic concepts is of special interest—that all historical writing must yield, in one way or another, to the post-Freudian description of the unconscious and its role in elaborating historians' interest in the historical as such.

Ever since Canada failed to be elected to the United Nations Security Council as a non-permanent member in June 2020, there have been calls for Ottawa to realign Canadian foreign policy with the national interest. It is hardly the first time that such a plea has been made: critics advocated similarly in the 1870s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and the 2000s. Yet, in each case, they recommended a different policy solution. Having reviewed these episodes, this essay concludes that the real debate in Canadian foreign policy has never been about the national interest, per se. To borrow from the language of strategy, Ottawa's critics have merely privileged different "ways" of achieving the same "ends," while everyone yearns for the "means" to do more.

In this book, Lars Schoultz explores the culture of "improvement" that defines the attitudes and values shaping all United States policies towards Latin America in the past and present. Schoultz's aim is to find the sources of this political and intellectual culture which has informed our relations with our southern neighbors and which continues to do so despite its faulty premises and its failure to effect change and transformation. Schoultz focuses on two period in the past as critical to embedding the culture and policies of improvement: the Progressive Era, which established the belief in "uplifting" others for their betterment, and the Cold War Era, which established the institutions for sustaining and implementing the process of uplifting a people and state. In Their Own Best Interest: A History of the U.S. Effort to Improve Latin Americans is a powerful historical indictment of a "constellation of beliefs" that has been a central part of Washington's foreign policy establishment and culture. The notion that the United States knows better than its allies and neighbors what is best for each of them resonates beyond Latin America and underlies much of the United States' foreign policies around the world.

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Yair Mintzker's book on Jew Süss raises a series of provocative questions about German history and history itself, which this forum aims to address. Specifically, it presents four reflections on Mintzker's book that cover the following range of topics: Jay Howard Geller situates Mintzker's work within the historiography on Jewish biographies and antisemitic trials; Sarah Maza explores whether Mintzker pursues the venerable task of getting to the "truth" of who Joseph Oppeinhemer was, despite his claims to the contrary; Jesse Spohnholz considers Mintzker's book as a model of microhistory; and my essay takes a broader approach by confronting the central issue of self-interest in history.