Abstract
In the autumn of 2009 I made my way to the New York apartment of Peter Gay, where he and I spent the afternoon talking about psychoanalysis and history. Peter will need little introduction to readers of this volume. His achievements as a historian are well-known, from his early work on the Enlightenment, to his multivolume study of bourgeois culture, to his recent survey of European modernism.1 He has been prolific, and his interests wide-ranging, including years during the 1980s training as a research analyst at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute in New Haven. His 1988 biography of Sigmund Freud, A Life for Our Time, stands out even among his various writings on psychoanalysis.2 Having early on rejected “psychohistory,” Peter developed what he described as a social history of ideas informed by psychoanalytic concepts. His historical writings consistently return to themes such as sexuality, aggression, repression, and self-understanding (or self-delusion). His biography of Freud portrays a thinker deeply indebted to the universal values of Enlightenment, rather than the specific circumstances of fin-de-siécle Vienna. Psychoanalytic and historical themes have been continually intertwined in his essays and books.
Probably it will always be a kind of corner, psychoanalysis and history. But … a little larger would be nice, a larger corner.
—Peter Gay, 2009
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Notes
Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959); The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York: Knopf, 1964); The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Knopf, 1966); The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2: The Science of Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1969); The Bourgeois Experience, 5 volumes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984, 1986; and New York: Norton, 1993, 1995, 1998); Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (New York: Norton, 2007).
For a complete bibliography of Gay’s writings through 2000, see Robert L. Dieter and Mark S. Micale, Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 377–393.
Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988); Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
Daniel Zalewski, “Fissures at an Exhibition,” Lingua Franca, November-December 1995.
See Irwin Molotsky, “Freud Show Delayed Amid Criticism,” New York Times (December 6, 1995).
Marc Fisher, “Under Attack, Library Shelves Freud Exhibit,” Washington Post (December 5, 1995).
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), vol. XXI, 75.
See Freud, Introductory Lectures (1916–1917) SE, XVI, 337–338; “The Expert Opinion in the Halsmann Case,” SE, 21, 251; Outline of Psycho-Analysis [1938], SE, XXIII, 192.
The first sentence of Horkheimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972), 1, reads thus: “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world.” This is the kind of Enlightenment that Freud was trying to avoid.
Michael S. Roth, Psycho-Analysis as History: Negation and Freedom in Freud (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987, 1995), 133.
Robert L. Dieter and Mark S. Micale, “Peter Gay: A Life in History,” the introduction to their excellent volume, Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 4–5. Dieter and Micale connect the ego psychologists emphasis on the instinct for mastery with Gay’s themes.
Robert Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Professsion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 410.
Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), x.
Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and the Psyche (New York: Knopf, 1980).
Gay, Freud: A Life, 742. Compare with Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3 (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 245–248.
See, e.g., Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Knopf, 1966).
Amelie Rorty, “Two Faces of Stoicism: Rousseau and Freud,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 34.3 (1996), 355.
Cicero, De Finibus, trans. H. Rackham (London: William Heinemann, 1914), III, 60–61.
Mark Edmundson, The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of his Last Days (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007).
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© 2012 Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor
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Roth, M.S. (2012). The Psychoanalytic Corner: Notes on a Conversation with Peter Gay. In: Alexander, S., Taylor, B. (eds) History and Psyche. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137092427_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137092427_2
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