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An Interview With Peter Gay |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: John C. Tibbetts |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 6/1/1991 |
| Size: 5,340 Words, 31,022 Characters |
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Although many readers today know Prof. Peter Gay primarily through his writings on Sigmund Freud, including the acclaimed biography Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), Gay's other works encompass a wide range of subjects--politics (The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, 1952), the Enlightenment (Voltaire's Politics, 1959 and The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 1966-69), art history (Art and Act: On Cause in History, 1976), and nineteenth-century studies (the ongoing series of books collectively titled, The Bourgeois Experience, begun in 1984). In each of these books he strives to explore within social and private contexts the genesis of social thought.
He was born in Berlin in 1923, emigrated with his family to Cuba in 1939, and came to the United States in 1941. He earned degrees from the University of Denver and Columbia University in political science and history; and in psychoanalysis from the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is currently Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. His conversation--like his books--may dwell one moment on composer Johannes Brahms, another on mid-nineteenth-century railway timetables, the social consequences of the postage stamp, female characters in David Copperfield, or the sex researches of Krafft-Ebing.
At age fifty in the mid-1970s he began a seven-year long training in psychoanalysis to prepare himself for his Bourgeois Experience series and his works on Freud. Psychoanalysis, says Gay, has been an important tool for his historical research. He writes in Freud for Historians:
The professional historian has always been a psychologist--an amateur psychologist. [He] constructs his work on the tacit conviction that human beings display certain stable and discernible traits. ... He discovers causes and his discovery normally includes acts of the mid.... Among all his auxiliary sciences, psychology is the historian's unacknowledged principal aide.
Thus, whether his subject is the history of an idea, a famous person (like Freud), or an ordinary middle-class citizen, Gay seeks out primary materials--letters, diaries, medical reports, private archives--to reveal how social thought has its origins in the public and private lives of individuals.
Freud remains one of Gay's most absorbing interests. Freud has figured prominently in many of his books, including Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (1978), The Bourgeois Experience series (1984-86), Freud for Historians (1985), and essays written for numerous reprints of Freud's major writings. Richard Wollheim, writing in the New York Times Book Review, concluded that the recent Freud biography possesses "a delightful freshness," whose vast erudition achieves a "wonderful transparency" that allows the reader to "see straight through it to its subject."
John C. Tibbetts: How did you come to write the Freud biography in the first place?
Peter Gay: It came out of some fifteen years of concentrated attention. I wasn't the first person to write about Freud, of course. The o...
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...g out our understanding of that. However, I am not willing just now to do a revision of the biography. It's much too soon. One of these days, I'll re-do it. And I'm accumulating stuff in the meantime--changes of mind on my part, some corrections. And I've obtained some more information about his early schooling. There is always so much more to learn about people. Freud himself taught us that.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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