FREUD
A Life for Our Time
Peter Gay
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988
810 pp., $25
It should say at the outset that Peter Gay's Freud will likely now become the standard biography of Freud. Gay is a distinguished and prolific historian who, late in his career, went through psychoanalytic training. He brings to bear on his subject the skills of a conscientious historian, the ability to write clear, strong English prose, the training of an analyst, and considerable enthusiasm for his subject. For those who want to follow the career and development of one of the most significant thinkers of our century, this is the work to read.
It is now there decades since the publication of Ernest Jones' important biography of Freud. Jones was given free run of Freud's papers: a privilege no one else, including Gay, has been granted. The confidence that the guardians of Freud's papers placed in Jones was not misplaced. Gay is right when he observes that Jones' "life of Freud remains indispensable." But Jones left us with a highly sanitized version of Freud. Jones was too adulatory, too willing to blunt the sharp edges. And one suspects that this is why he was allowed such complete access to materials closed to everyone else: He could be trusted to be discreet. This is, however, not a trait one wishes to encourage in a serious scholar. However, not a trait one wishes to encourage in a serious scholar. However much Gay admires Freud and believes him to have been correct in his essential positions, Gay clearly feels neither an obligation to defend nor to conceal.
There is a major problem in presenting a biography of Freud, and Gay is aware of it. He writes: "One interpreter of Freud with whom I disagree is Freud himself. He may have been literally correct, but was essentially misleading, when he called his life 'externally quiet and without content,' to be 'disposed of with a few dates.' To be sure, Freud's life, superficially looks like that of any other highly educated, intelligent, and active nineteenth-century physician: he was born, he studied, he traveled, he married, he practiced, he lectured, he argued, he aged, he died. But his internal drama is gripping enough to command any biographer's unflagging attention."
The point is that there had better be an internal drama, for the external drama is lacking. Freud lived a proper and conventional life. His adventures were confined to the realm of the spirit. He was an eminently successful man. Although he sometimes liked to romanticize his early rejection and isolation, the fact remains that he was an honored and venerated figure in his lifetime. He did not get involved in public causes; there was no great Calas case in his life as there was for another intellectual, Voltaire, about whom, Gay has also written a biography. Freud's life was enveloped in his work and in domesticity. From time to time he met or corresponded with major intellectual and literary figures, like Rilke, Einstein, and Mann. But his close and abiding personal relationships were limited to those colleagues whom he led to the practice of the profession he had created. That is to say, he was an intellectual and his life was dull as intellectuals' lives frequently are and always should be. The work is excitement
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