The Freud Reader

by Peter Gay

FREUD READER, THE

896 pages, Unknown Binding

About the author

Peter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968); and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).
Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.
Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".

Reviews

[Jorge · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive collection of basically everything you'd need to read by Freud. Gay's editorializing of Freud's views may come off as intrusive to some, but to me it was kind of humorous (it's true that he was unreasonably anti-American and obliviously sexist), and betrayed a very intimate knowledge of the subject. Reading Freud's early case studies and his decisive psychoanalytic texts like "Narcissism" and "The Ego and the Id" was far more enlightening than his later, politically-oriented works like "The Future of an Illusion" and "Civilization and its Discontents." I'm surprised that "Civilization," which I've never read before, has such a great reach beyond Freud-centric studies, as it seems like a springboard for Rene Girard's fairly out-there ideas of sacrifice and mimesis. Anyway, I did feel like this was a big missing piece of my haphazard autodidactic education, and I'm glad to have finally addressed that. I will be returning to some of these essays.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

For someone who has so much to say about women Freud really has nothing to say about women. Knowing that some of the women in these case studies were essentially seemed stupid and ‘hysteric’ yet that they then went on to become revolutionary feminists … anger. incredibly insightful and, regrettably, genius but the point still stands that actually LISTENING to women talk about their desires and trauma tells you a lot more about the so called “dark continent” of the female psyche than a man guessing ever can…

[Timur Usenov · Rating 4 out of 5]

I forgive him. Worst final of my life.