His psychoanalytical study of Freud is not, then, an easy read. The fact is that this would still be a difficult book to read (and review) even if one did not fundamentally disagree with almost all the premises which have underpinned Freud’s theories and therapeutic techniques since the 1900s. Therein lies the major flaw in this biography. Professor Gay is an extremely learned man and as an ardent disciple knows his Freud inside out. Both are now being abandoned as a new approach to psychiatry, a biological one, centred on the brain, on neurochemistry, on pharmacology and on medication takes over. Like sociology it was once a very chic and fashionable subject to study and teach but the publication of its papers stirred up such an angry wasps’ nest of criticism from more orthodox historians that by the early 1980s anti-psychohistory had sprung up as a profession in itself. Psychohistory, which emerged out of America in 1958, is patterned on Freud’s own psychologically overstated or factually flawed studies of Moses, Leonardo da Vinci and Woodrow Wilson. This is now his sixth book on Freud in ten years, a decade during which Professor Gay also became one of the leading psychohistorians in America. One can only speculate on what personal dramas prompted Professor Gay to make this extraordinary move but since the mid-1970s he has been a zealous crusader for Freud and psychoanalysis. After five books had been published to wide critical acclaim he decided to submit to Freudian analysis preparatory to undergoing full training as a psychoanalyst. Peter Gay is Sterling Professor of History at Yale and used to be well-known and respected in university circles for his elegant and erudite books on the Enlightenment.
His ghost has hovered over the potty ever since.
But such a golden age was certainly dead by the turn of this century: killed by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) who sat, Svengali-like, with notebook in hand behind the famous couch in Vienna.Īs a child he too wet his bed and disturbed his parents during a post-luncheon session (he was so upset by his father’s yells that he came back later and defiantly urinated on the floor whilst his incredulous parents looked on, speechless) and then spent the greater part of his remaining eighty years of life trying to convince everyone that infantile sexuality was at the root of all subsequent adult neuroses. Perhaps there once was a time when you could happily wet the bed, play with your faeces or your sister, barge into your parents bedroom without knocking and still grow up to be a relatively pulled-together human being unburdened by the weight of repressed guilt.
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