Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments

by Peter Gay

Essays discuss Freud's interest in Shakespeare, his choices for the names of his six children, his love of science, and his ambivalent feelings toward his father

Genres: Psychology

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

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

[Ledya · Rating 4 out of 5]

no i didn't cry over a freud biography, you cried over a freud biography

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

READING FREUD is a book as revealing and as kind to the author, as it is to his subject, the founder of psychoanalysis and great “unriddler of mysteries.” Peter Gay’s multiple essays divided into two parts — Explorations and Entertainments — enable the reader to process and, also, enjoy Freud's own adventures and misadventures, in matters both trivial and of great importance.

I recommend the book to a both Freud's admirers and doubters. The range and depth of Gay's storytelling, as well as his scholarship, in addition to his fondness for his subject, offers a fine antidote to so much simplification, useless speculation and unfounded hostility regarding Dr. Freud. Gay shows that complexity and personal failings do not distract from genius, but are rather a necessary part of its development.

It will soon be 2020 and Dr. Freud's beliefs, findings, missteps, struggles and the life around them are as rewarding and as relevant as they were decades, even a century ago.