The history of psychoanalysis has become an industry. And in a complex way an industry that is amazingly self‐reflexive. Historians of psychoanalysis become obsessed with the history of psychoanalysis and the end result can be productive or it can be simply a form of what is usually called ‘Whig’ history – the assumption that the historian knows better than the subject of his or her history and that there is an upward trajectory of knowledge, culminating in the present stance of the author. No modesty here. The insights of the present trump everything else.