... Ankersmit on History as Psychoanalysis (without Normativity)...

 F. R. Ankersmit. Historiography and Postmodernism // History and Theory, Vol. 28, No. 2. (May, 1989), pp. 137-153

• "The situation which Nietzsche feared more than a hundred years ago, the situation in which historiography itself impedes our view of the past, seems to have become reality.  Not only does this flood of historical literature give us all a feeling of intense despondency, but this overproduction undeniably has something uncivilized about it.  We associate civilization with, among other things, a feeling for moderation, for a happy medium between excess and shortage.  Any feeling for moderation, however, seems to have been lost in our present-day intellectual alcoholism.  This comparison with alcoholism is also very apt because the most recent book or article on a particular topic always pretends to be the very last intellectual drink".
• Their is no point to discuss usefulness of the historiography — it's just a prt of the culture like literature etc.  "For that reason science and politics do not belong to culture; if something can have a use or a disadvantage or enables us to manipulate the world it is not a part of civilization".  History in this regard have no immediate use, it belongs to the field of "absolute presupposition" in terms of Collingwood.
• "One of the most fundamental characteristics of information is that really important information is never the end of an information genealogy, but that its importance is in fact assessed by the intellectual posterity it gives rise to".
• Structure of historiography as "intensional language" in the sense that "the author hopes/believes that…".  In  this regard the historiography closer to the art than to the science.  Historical fact is hidden behind the source.  
• evidence does not point to the past but to an interpretation of the past.  "Evidence is not a magnifying glass through which we can study the past, but bears more resemblance to the brushstrokes used by the painter to achieve a certain effect.  Evidence does not send us back to the past, but gives rise to the question what an historian here and now can or cannot do with it".  The period may only be grasped through the traces, "fragrance" that it leaves to the past to the historian.  "the essence of a period is determined by the destinataire… by the historian who has to develop here and now his negative of a period from that which was not said or was only whispered, or was expressed only in insignificant details.  The historian is like the connoisseur who recognizes the artist not by that which is characteristic of him (and consequently imitable) but by that which, so to speak, spontaneously "escaped" him".  Similar to the psychoanalyse gesture.
• Essence of the past is not in its essence, as in the psyche: period is what it is not.
• History is all reassembled in the present.  And in this way the present becomes the history.  "We must not shape ourselves according to or in conformity with the past, but learn to play our cultural game with it".  And the structure repeats itself with the individual history/self, ontogenesis repeats phylogenesis.  The memory has priority over what is remembered.  Past is remembering.
• Contrary shift however operates.  Ref. to Foucault on the study of power/words link.  This gives new demotion to the historiography: "metaphorical dimension in historiography is more powerful than the literal or factual dimensions".  History becomes metaphor for studies.  "there is reason to assume that our relation to the past and our insight into it will in future be of a metaphorical nature rather than a literal one".