It might be just about time for a pro-Freud reading of Freud to take off again, now that the utter failure of drug-dependent psychiatry has become obvious. I'm not sure we need this one, though, which is extraordinarily long, includes masses of pretty much irrelevant detail, and mostly fails to clarify ideas that really aren't all that complicated. Gay's sentences are very nice in isolation, but they're not all that helpful when it comes to understanding what Freud was doing.

What lesson should we learn from this book? I got a hard cover from the first edition (not worth anything, of course). It is a beautiful object. It lies flat when open. The case is not glued, willy nilly, to the spine of the book. It has a full cloth cover. The paper might actually last into the next decade. Let's bring that back, and get someone to write a new, more concise, very slightly less, positive biography of Freud to go between the boards. ( )

Gay's biography is well structured and provides insights into Freud's life, work, and relationships. Most impressive of all the author captures the humanity of his subject, a figure that is often raised high or scapegoated and thrown in the gutter.

Excellent photo history of associates....and his family ( )

The Future of a Hero
a review of "Sigmund Freud: A Life for Our Time" by Peter Gay

This is going to be more of a comparative analysis, than a straight review, since I have at least one independent source of information on the subject, which shall inform my critique.

In this book, Gay is aware of criticism to Freud, but resists it.

In Peter Kramer's "Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind", he reluctantly-- as the subtitle gives testimony-- offers evidence of Freud's mistakes and mis-doings, and reluctantly offers his conclusion at the very end that the hero was not so much a hero at-all. ("We may feel saddened and depleted-- I do-- at the loss of a hero...." (p.159). And, despite admiring Freud's prose style, Kramer writes that Freud "had altered fact to fit theory, conducted therapies in ways that bore scant relationship to his precepts, and claimed success in treatments that had failed." p. 8, ISBN 9780061744044)

There are two interesting differences between the biographers. One is their age-- Kramer is fully a quarter of a century younger; the one was born in 1923, the other in 1948. (And therefore, each one's age during the 70s, when Freud's influence began a relative decline, is different.) Relatedly is the date of their work-- Gay's is from 1988, and Kramer's from 2006. (Gay was also a few years older at the time of writing, although not significantly so.) Even by the date of the earlier work, the years of Freud's unchallenged-ness were over, and Gay was aware of the criticisms, (or at least some of them), although he generally discounts them. Kramer's work is later, and much more contemporary-- in the intervening years, alot of evidence came to light, much of it not positive, about Sigmund Freud, which was available to the latter-day biographer who was willing to use it. Kramer does use it, although the weight that he gives to it varies. During the time of Gay's work, criticism of Freud was less developed.

The other obvious difference between the biographers can be gleaned from their respective bibliographies (and biographical sketches): Kramer is a psychiatrist, and, although not a iconoclast, is well aware of the changes in his own field. For example, having written books about depression, he is aware of instances in which Freud's ideas are no longer in current use. (He also mentions (p.16) that Freud's "concepts are too distant from current belief to merit any research effort." Here, "too distant" is essentially a euphemism for "obsolete".) Gay, on the other hand, is more a writer about intellectual history in a broader sense, and his works include topics that lend themselves to what I might consider in some sense to have a light, academic conservatism-- for example, the Enlightenment of the 18th century, and the life of classical composer Amadeus Mozart. Mozart is perhaps a good example-- he himself lived with a good degree of flair, but, without trying to sound unkind, it does not really require much flair to write in praise of a figure universally praised. Also, despite the reality of the subject, sometimes the study of classical music lends itself to the idea that things do not *really* change, and that elder disciplines are always the better, etc. Whatever the reason, I do not think that Gay's training lends to him a willingness to challenge received opinion. Kramer does not perhaps like to *challenge* it head-on, but his profession requires him to be prepared to re-consider it, in a way that some professions would not.

So for these various reasons, there is this difference between the two of them, and one good example of it is the example that Kramer gives in the beginning of his book, to explain the change in the climate of opinion about Freud. (Gay chooses to begin his book largely by contemplating the significance of the fact that "The Interpretation of Dreams" was published in the year 1900.) This example is that of Horace Frink, a friend of Freud's who was treated by him. Frink was subject to a mood disorder, and was eventually said by a different doctor to be suffering from manic-depressive disorder. But Freud claimed that he was experiencing symptoms of a latent homosexuality, which Freud considered a disease, and vigorously prodded Frink into an affair with a married woman, Angelika Bijur, whom neither knew very well. (The woman husband's, Abraham Bijur, wrote a letter demanding to know if Freud was "savant or charlatan"-- a letter which did not come to light for years.) Frink himself was married, with two children, but he followed Freud's advice and married Mrs. Bijur-- their marriage was a brief one, which ended in divorce, and Frink had a breakdown. This breakdown disqualified him for a position Freud had been considering him for, and Freud merely attributed the breakdown to the national character flaws of Americans. All this is from the Kramer book-- only the information of the preceding sentence is included in Gay's (rather long) book. (He does not even mention that Freud was treating Frink, although the book is in other sections generously padded with backround material, to say nothing of his pedantic use of the untranslated.) Kramer says that details of the Frink affair only came to the public's knowledge in the 1980s, the decade that Gay's book was written in. Either the bulk of these details had not come to light yet, Gay was unaware of these newly-disclosed details, or simply it takes time for these discoveries to filter into the collective consciousness, and Peter Gay was not the man to bring them to light.

In short, or as a result of all this, (of the biographers' differences as people), I might say that Gay writes of Freud as informed by his theories, while Kramer tries rather to explain these in part by illuminating his life.

{Or, more simply, Gay writes as if his objective were to write a sort of companion piece to Freud's collected writings, rather than an independent work, a biography, and a work of *critical thinking*.}

Also, Freud often makes very extreme, always-or-never sorts of statements, and Gay merely repeats many of these without ever commenting that they are in any way less than usual or at all unsatisfactory. (Freud's method was "turning the particular into the general and the moderate into the extreme" (Kramer, p.69), and although generalization is *sometimes* useful, it is not *always*.... and Freud often viewed anything less than total agreement as complete dissension, so I suppose that even this would have to viewed as a clear criticism.)

Kramer also makes some effort to place Freud's work in the context of his time-- of his colleagues, contemporaries, friends. He even asserts that there is some continuity today with medicine *before* Freud, for example, in the case of 'the unconscious', a term which pre-dates him. Gay, on the other hand, tends to dismiss Freud's friends when Sigmund does, and sometimes even says that their contributions to science ended when Freud discarded their friendship. (It would be to place the emphasis somewhere else, at the very least, to mention that Freud often discarded his friends.)

Then, at times Gay does criticize Freud *to some extent*, but in softer tones than perhaps he merits. For example, Freud's involvement with Emma Eckstein's treatment is not so much condemned on the grounds that Freud helped to hurt a patient, but rather through a sort of soft-ball rumination that Freud unfortunately put too much by his friend Fliess, so oh well. Gay puts on soft gloves when dealing with big mistakes. This is perhaps because his skill is more in ruminating at some length, often on the backround architecture, than exercizing skilled judgments of persons.

And at other times Mr. Gay is simply blind to the specific wrongs that the 'great doctor' did to specific persons. (And not for lack of space: Gay spends page after page on trifles, for example: Freud puttering around in Rome, visiting ruins.) Often, this was because quite "regularly, he [Freud] set aside commonsensical explanations of symptoms in favor of recondite ones that advanced a cherished theory." (Kramer, p. 13) This is especially true in relation to the Dora case, in which Freud ignored the patient's obvious problems and invented ones that did not exist.

But Gay merely cautiously criticizes Freud's "insensitivity", but then, seeing even through the lens of Freudian theory, feels compelled to try to retrieve, at least partially, some justification for Freud's indefensible actions towards his patient(s).

Examples could perhaps be multiplied, but there is some point-- which Mr. Gay himself cannot find-- when enough words have been wasted.

In the end, Gay finds Freud too lofty a figure to criticize properly. He draws not to light either the faults of his public or private life-- neither the wrong he did to his friends, nor his academic chauvinism.

.... I find Freud a good example of the fact that great prestige does not ensure that a thinker knows the truth.

And in conclusion, I must say that although Mr. Gay's book contains reams of information, it does not always really bring forth the truth.

(7/10) ( )

thorough, positive biography--pro-psychoanalysis, but not a hagiography