Abstract
This paper proposes a psychoanalytic reading of the work of the French historian Jean Delumeau, History of Fear in the West, about the feeling of fear of the devil in the West. The main goal of this work is to perform an interdisciplinary discussion between Psychoanalysis and History about the feeling of fear and how the two disciplines understand it. We begin presenting the theory of fear mainly from considerations of Sigmund Freud in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, taking the fear as based primarily in the anguish of castration. Then we present the contributions of the New Cultural History for discussion of the topic, which takes fear as a historical construction and, because of that, must be understood within their specific context. Finally, we present points where both theories converge and diverge, not properly looking for a synthesis of the two areas, but as different forms of knowledge production.
Keywords:
History; Psychoanalysis; Fear