Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud in His Time and for Our Time

Abstract

Peter Gay's massive new biography of Freud is subtitled: A Life for Our Time. Although Gay does not discuss the intended meaning of the subtitle, even casual reader of his text will soon become aware of at least two ways in which Freud's life is to be perceived as life for time. First, Gay presents Freud's life as an exemplary ideal, as the historical embodiment of intellectual and moral virtues relevant to an defined broadly enough to encompass Freud's own time and perhaps even time, or at least modem times. Readers of Gay's earlier work will find few surprises in this richly detailed, elegantly written portrait of Freud as both the indefatigable, tough-minded investigator of life's riddles who succeeded in making the pursuit of full-time, lifelong profession and the courageous self-overcomer whose triumphs over his own irrational wishes and illusions grounded his objective, scientific description of the workings of the unconscious mind in all of us. 1 Without obvious irony Gay can introduce his life as history of Freud's conquests, of which the most dramatic was that of himself (p. xx). But Gay clearly intends his phrase a life for our to be read in another way as well-as description of his own project in composing biography of Freud from the historical perspective and for the historical consciousness of our specific time, half century after Freud's death. From this perspective Freud's struggles and projects, his pursuit of truth and self-mastery, appear to Gay not so much culturally alien or historically outdated as simply