Peter Gay

It contains fifty-one key texts, spanning Freud's entire career from early case histories through his work on dreams, essays on sexuality, and on to his late writings, including Civilisation and Its Discontents. Peter Gay, a leading scholar of Freud, has put together this selection to provide a full portrait of Freud's thought.

Gay's search through middle-class Victorian culture, illuminated by lively portraits of such daunting figures as Bismarck, Darwin and his acolytes, George Eliot, and the great satirists Daumier and Wilhelm Busch, covers a vast terrain: the relations between men and women, wit, demagoguery, and much more. We discover the multiple ways in which the nineteenth century at once restrained aggressive behavior and licensed it. Aggression split the social universe into insiders and outsiders. "By gathering up communities of insiders," Professor Gay writes, the Victorians "discovered--only too often invented--a world of strangers beyond the pale, of individuals and classes, races and nations it was perfectly proper to debate, patronize, ridicule, bully, exploit, or exterminate." The aggressions so channeled or bottled could not be contained forever. Ultimately, they exploded in the First World War.

“As every biographer of Freud must ruefully acknowledge, Freud, that great unriddler of mysteries, left behind some intriguing private mysteries of his own. It was because I hoped to solve some of these mysteries that the stratagem of finding my way to Freud by indirections commended itself to me.” –Peter GayIn this book, the eminent cultural historian and Freud scholar Peter Gay presents a series of essays in which he tries to “reduce the blank spots on the map we now have of Freud’s mind.” Engaging as well as illuminating, the essays range from reflections on Freud and Shakespeare to Gay’s controversial spoof review of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. The book begins with “Freud and the Man from Stratford,” in which Gay describes Freud’s fascination with the theory that the Earl of Oxford was the real author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare and speculates on the reasons for Freud’s belief. “Six Names in Search of an interpretation” considers Freud’s choices of names for his six children and what they revealed about his Jewishness, his love of science, and his ambivalent feelings toward his father. “Freud on Freedom” deals with the issue of determinism and free will in Freud’s work. “Reading Freud through Freud’s Reading” analyzes ten “good” books Freud identified in response to a questionnaire. The second half of the book, entitled “Entertainments,” includes an essay on “Serious Jests” that cites some vintage Jewish jokes frequently recounted by Freud and points out how these chestnuts illustrate not only psychoanalytic concepts but the anti-Semitism that permeated Freud’s Vienna; the “review” of The Interpretation of Dreams, published in Harper’s in 1981; “A Gentile Science?” which is a “report” on the work of one Sigmund Oberhufer, a fictitious Austrian doctor said to have “invented” psychoanalysis; and “The Dog That Did Not Bark in the Night,” Gay’s account of the newly accessible correspondence between Freud and his sister-in-law Minna Bernays, who some writers claim was his lover. The essays, some of them published for the first time or expanded from their original versions, are accompanied by informative introductions.

“Why did none of the devout create psychoanalysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?” Freud once asked. In this book, the eminent historian and Freud scholar Peter Gay enters the long-running controversy about the relationship between religion and psychoanalysis. Gay takes seriously Freud’s claim that he was an atheist and argues that atheism was an essential stance for the making of psychoanalysis. He contends, in fact, that Judaism was not essential and that psychoanalysis is not a “Jewish science,” as both anti-Semites and ardent Freudians have often assumed. Peter Gay begins by discussing why psychoanalysis could only have been conceived by an atheist. According to him, Freud saw science and religion as absolutely at odds with each other. While some theologians and analysts have attempted to forge an alliance between psychoanalytic and religious positions, these attempts at accommodation have failed and must fail. Psychoanalysis is not a religion, and the two comprise wholly incompatible styles of thinking about the world. Gay then deals with the question of whether Freud’s Jewish background contributed to the creation of psychoanalysis and describes Freud’s secular Judaism: while Freud was very much aware of his Jewishness and was in fact proud of it, this had nothing to do with the making of psychoanalysis itself. True, Freud himself saw a possible link between his Jewishness and his daring: as a Jew he was treated ass an outsider and therefore, he thought, could approach delicate topics such as sexuality more boldly than he would have if he had been thoroughly lodged on the inside. However, Gay maintains that this is at best a weak statement. Writing with his customary wit and charm, Gay not only discusses Freud’s life and personality as they affected his ideas on religion but also compares Freud’s thoughts on religion to those of William James, Charles Darwin, Paul Tillich, and a host of Enlightenment figures. The result is a book that will richly reward ever reader. Published in association with Hebrew Union College Press

What does an historian’s style reveal? In this original and lucid guide to the proper reading of Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay, and Burckhardt—great historians who were also great stylists—Peter Gay demonstrates that, style is an invaluable clue to the historian's insight. Thus, for Peter Gay, style is the key to culture, and the “truth” of history—as it helps to define that culture—can only be fully understood through an objective and thorough analysis of all its elements.

Is psychoanalysis a legitimate tool for helping us understand the past? Many traditional historians have answered with an emphatic no, greeting the introduction of Freud into historical study with responses ranging from condescending skepticism to outrage. Now Peter Gay, one of America's leading historians, builds an eloquent case for "history informed by psychoanalysis" and offers an impressive rebuttal to the charges of the profession's anti-Freudians. In this book, Gay takes on the opposition's arguments, defending psychoanalysis as a discipline that can enhance social, economic, and literary studies. No mere polemic, Freud for Historians is a thoughtful and detailed contribution to a major intellectual debate.