Abstract
In the past 50 years many scholars have argued that a pluralist, democratic society such as ours requires a variety of historical interpretations about itself which reflect a diversity of sometimes-competing interpretive strategies. Psychoanalytic understandings of individuals and of collectives are a rich source of these interpretive models. However, such pluralism is not the same as ‘anything goes’: there are standards of scholarship by which to evaluate historical claims and arguments. For example, we reject most revisionist historians' readings of the Holocaust. As I argued at length in my review, Shorter's account of the recent history of psychiatry is deeply flawed and I am not reassured by Kaplan's view that Shorter's racy style will at least get psychiatrists to be more interested in the history of our profession. Indeed, an historical account of psychoanalysis that is even more lacking in historical understanding and even more ad hominem than Shorter's is to be found in Kaplan's own writings on the subject [1].