Peter Gay Research Articles

On Freud's Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (review)

Reviewed by: On Freud's Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions Sander L. Gilman Jay Geller . On Freud's Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. xii + 355 pp. $80.00 (cloth, 978-0-8232-2781-5), $28.00 (paperbound, 978-0-8232-2782-2). Jay Geller, who teaches at the Vanderbilt Divinity School, has collected and reshaped his contributions on Freud and his Jewish context, researched and writ-ten over the past twenty-five years, into a comprehensive and readable volume. [End Page 221] On Freud's Jewish Body begins with a valuable stocktaking. Looking at the debates about Freud and his times in the historical and critical literature (including my own work) Geller teases out patterns of emphasis and strings of argument that range from Freud as a repressed religious Jew (Yosef Yerushalmi) to Freud as an atheist Jew alienated from all ritual practice (Peter Gay). He examines these debates as they structured the very idea of Freud's relationship to "Jewishness" that the historians and critics both wish to explicate but which they also use in their works. After this important and focused analysis, Geller places his own work within postmodern theories about the social construction of embodiedness. In the first substantial chapter of the book, he examines slips of the tongue as examined in Freud's work and focuses on the rather specific Viennese question of "Jewish– Gentile" (Geller's terms) intermarriage in the late nineteenth century. The slips of the tongue examined reveal the anxiety in the culture about identity boundaries and the impact of Freud's own conflict about his Jewish identity in the time. In chapter 2, Geller turns to the origins of psychoanalysis as represented in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and specifically, in the central dream interpreted in this volume: the "dream of Irma's injection." Here Geller builds on a range of existing interpretations of Freud's reading of this dream and shows the conflicted nature of the historical record in examining the representation of the origins of psychoanalysis. To resolve them, he relies on a rather interesting archival source, Max Schur's 1966 transcription of Freud's correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess (which provides our access to the "day residue" prominent in the dream of Irma's injection). Geller is a great reader of the "slips" and puns that result from multiple readings. In this chapter, he shows how Schur's misreading (a slip of the pen) provides a true insight in the one possible reading of this seminal text. Geller also discusses the importance of his discovery of the first review of Freud's Studies in Hysteria (1895) and its Viennese author to an understanding of Freud's later rethinking of the meaning of the "day residue" in his own interpretation of his dream in 1900. In the third chapter, Geller looks at Freud's 1927 essay on "fetishism" and the reading of the "nose" in a number of Freud's published case studies, especially that of the "Wolf Man" (1918) and "Little Hans" (1909). Geller examines the question of the relationship between the genital and the nose postulated by Freud's confident Wilhelm Fleiss and the centrality of the debates about the difference of the Jewish male body that haunted Freud's Vienna, especially around the question of the ritual practice of circumcision and its implications for Jewish physical difference. In chapter 5, Geller looks at a further case study, that of Daniel Paul Schreber (1911), and Freud's own notes to Schreber's published memoir present in Freud's library in London. Since Freud's sole access to this patient was through his reading of this volume (it was suggested to him by C. G. Jung), Freud's notes, as Geller shows, are a major insight on his reading and on the importance that anti-Semitic rhetoric (present throughout Schreber's text in complex ways) had in his understanding of Schreber's psychosis. [End Page 222] In his sixth chapter, Geller examines Freud's mass psychology in the light of anti-Semitism of the time and then deals with Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913) and Freud's image of masculinity. Geller situates this image...

Осмысляя Сталина

SUMMARY: In his survey review article, Ronald Suny analyzes various approaches taken by historians to the biography of Iosif Stalin. He situates biographical studies of Stalin on a continuum of historical reflections that stretches from neglect of the individual features of historical actors in structuralist or Marxist methodologies to an overemphasis on individual and psychological features (to the neglect of socioculturally constructed biographies) in the Freudian tradition and studies of psycho-history. This survey of historical research that directly or indirectly pertains to reconstruction of Stalin’s biography starts with the first attempts of Leon Trotsky and Boris Souvarin and ends with contemporary writings, including those of Simon Sebag Montefiore. Suny strongly criticizes the prevalence of psychoanalytical approaches to Stalin’s biography that retain the reductionist core of their methodological point of departure, which results in neglect of the contextual and socioculturally embedded paths of lived lives. However, he also notes, with reference to Peter Gay, that even those historians who are not shaped by the psychoanalytic tradition also tend to resort to a one-cause, unidimensional frame of interpretation of Stalin’s biography. This reductionism is unveiled by the author in his analysis of the most recent biographies of Stalin by Montefiore.

Reflections on Hitler's Refugees in the United States Keynote Speech

Journal Article Reflections on Hitler's Refugees in the United States. Keynote Speech Get access Peter Gay Peter Gay Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 53, Issue 1, January 2008, Pages 117–126, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/53.1.117 Published: 01 January 2008

Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad Y. Michal Bodemann Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad, by Steven E. Aschheim. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007. 208 pp. $27.95. Steven Aschheim begins his study on German Jewish intellectuals with Hannah Arendt’s observation that the German-speaking Jews were an “altogether unique phenomenon” which calls for urgent investigation. In this richly erudite book with its nearly 500 footnotes, Aschheim has contributed to just that imperative, and while much has been written on the Weimar German Jewish intellectuals, Aschheim has approached his subject in a manner which other studies could not attempt to do. In the first of his three essays, he addresses the role of German-Jewish intellectuals in Palestine, from Martin Buber to Arthur Ruppin, and their brand of bi-nationally oriented humanist Zionism; in the second, he deals with the role of the émigré historians, mostly in the U.S. (which might explain why Eric Hobsbawm, for example, was excluded) and their role in shaping a new brand of cultural history, and in the last chapter, he asks what might have made these intellectuals (Benjamin, Arendt, Scholem, Adorno, and others) so influential and “fascinating” to younger generations of Western intellectuals today. All three of Aschheim’s intellectual incursions, then, address the rich cultural and intellectual environment we associate with the Weimar Republic, itself the culmination of developments from the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Jewish emancipation, democratic patriotism of 1848, and the socialist movement later on. The formation of these German-Jewish intellectuals, their habitus and world views, cannot be explained outside this legacy. And as Jews, they did not even have the chance to become enamored of Weimar’s other strains—antisemitism and völkisch nationalism. Despite their humanist formation, then, Aschheim seems to flirt with the idea, amply contradicted by his own evidence and arguments, that the figures around the Brith Shalom in Palestine were inspired not by German/European liberalism and humanism, but by the negative experiences of European barbarities in World War I and experiences of ethno-nationalism throughout Europe. No doubt the harrowing experiences of the Great War were a catalytic element, but as the author himself points out, there were indeed workable models of ethno-national co-existence in Europe, from Switzerland and Belgium to the Danish minority in Schleswig and most of all, perhaps, Austro-Hungary with the multi-ethnic communities of Prague or Czernowitz. Austro-Marxism provided a model there, as well as the universalistic message [End Page 185] of socialism that influenced many in Brith Shalom and German-Jewish intellectuals (Benjamin, Adorno) elsewhere. These German-Jewish notions are quite distinct, then, from Jabotinsky and his East European followers, and a debate such as Lenin’s discussion of the “Bund in the Party” would have been inconceivable in the West. Moreover, the different assimilationist and universalist habitus of Western Jewry was markedly different from that of their Jewish brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe. Amos Oz’s novels have portrayed that intellectual chasm very powerfully. The “crises of conscience” incurred by members of Brith Shalom in the wake of later developments in Palestine, which made a bi-national solution impossible, are hardly reconcilable with notions of Realpolitik that might have grown out of the negative experiences in Europe per se. In light of recent debates concerning a binational solution in Israel/Palestine, Aschheim makes clear that the ideas of Brith Shalom have not lost any of their power and logic. In the second part, Aschheim shows how a small number of émigré historians have created a quite original form of German cultural history, and he contrasts that to the parallel development of a politically committed social history as it developed in West Germany around the same time, from the 1960’s onwards. The émigré cultural historians, a handful including George Mosse, Peter Gay and Fritz Stern, made it their life’s work to address the question of how Nazism became possible within the cultural traditions of Germany, and they were in a position to examine that subject unencumbered by the contemporary German context and its political discourses of guilt and denial, and without the dubious advantage...

DISPLACED HISTORIANS, DIALECTICAL HISTORIES

For German‐Jewish refugees, the Holocaust and its aftermath produced extremely difficult questions of identity and memory. The considerable literature on German‐Jewish émigré historians has rarely addressed scholars’ efforts to confront such questions, and has particularly neglected the important role of second‐generation refugee historians. This article examines the connection between the experiences, memories and scholarship of two leading second‐generation emigrant historians: George L. Mosse and Peter Gay. As children, Mosse and Gay lived the Goethian Germany of Bildung, and then fled as the same Germany produced the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Each went on to write important work on the life and death of the modern German‐Jewish community. This article contends that Mosse and Gay thus shared a unique combination of intimacy and distance regarding German and German‐Jewish history. Such a combination and a correspondent status of insider‐outsider made Mosse’s and Gay’s lives and perspectives paradigmatic of the dialectical paths of Germany in the twentieth century.

Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (review)

Reviewed by: Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy Tobias Boes Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Eric D.Weitz . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. pp. xi + 425. $29.95 (cloth). With this exciting new book, Eric D. Weitz offers a timely addition to the growing array of historical surveys of the Weimar Republic. His competition includes, to name only the best-known titles, Hans Mommsen's The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy (1996), Detlev Peukert's The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (1989), and, of course, Peter Gay's magisterial Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968). While Weitz devotes chapters to both the political and economic history of the Republic, his clear focus is on cultural matters, and as such Gay is his most immediate rival. The two works even display a similar structure, bookending synchronic analyses of Weimar culture with chapters on the Republic's birth and demise. To take on one of the seminal works of twentieth-century historiography in such direct fashion may seem a Quixotic task, but Weitz acquits himself well. Rereading Gay, I was struck above all by two things. First, the fact that Weimar Culture now stands closer to the time that it surveys than to our own ("The Weimar Republic died only thirty-five years ago, in 1933, yet it is already a legend," reads its opening sentence).1 Second, the extent to which Gay is wedded to his psychoanalytically articulated belief that the death of the Republic was an inevitable response to the transgressions of its founders. Weitz's work, by contrast, is not only thoroughly up-to-date in its scholarship (a useful bibliographic essay is included), but also clearly written with the present moment in mind. Summarizing his central contentions, Weitz writes in the final paragraph: "The threats to democracy are not always from enemies abroad. They can come from those within who espouse the language of democracy and use the liberties afforded them by democratic institutions to undermine the substance of democracy" (367–68). Weitz, however, attempts far more than merely to produce a new history of Weimar suitable for the age of the "War on Terror." His aim is to transform the way that we approach the 1920s in Germany. As he argues, interpretations that would view the Republic as doomed from the beginning are mistaken. Instead, promise and tragedy hung in the balance for most of Weimar's lifetime, and history could have read very differently had it not been for a series of short-sighted blunders on the part of people who should have known better. In order to make this last point, Weitz skillfully refocuses our gaze on some of the period's central cultural manifestations, moving what was previously in the foreground to the background and highlighting materials that might otherwise have been mentioned only in passing. His section on film, for instance, dutifully begins with a summary of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the expressionist motion picture that scores of cultural historians, including Gay, have read as an allegory of repressed Weimar autocracy. But Weitz's real interests clearly lie elsewhere, and he quickly moves into analyses of Walter Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of the Big City (1927) and Billy Wilder's People on Sunday (1930), two films that celebrate the modern condition with unabashed excitement. He also reminds us that cinema during the 1920s was a truly international [End Page 408] affair. Weimar audiences not only consumed the products of their own culture industry, but also cheered on the revolutionary crowds in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and suffered alongside Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush (both released in Germany in 1926). Similarly, when Weitz turns to the visual arts, he focuses his attention not on the verist paintings of Neue Sachlichkeit or on dadaist collages, but rather on the photographs of László Moholy-Nagy, who froze fleeting impressions of modern street life into hauntingly abstract compositions (Hannah Höch does receive separate treatment in a later chapter). While the canvases of Otto Dix, George Grosz, and others have always seemed to provide visual confirmation of the moral corruption that bubbled under the surface of Weimar society (most...

Reflections on Hitler's Refugees in the United States. Keynote Speech

Journal Article Reflections on Hitler's Refugees in the United States. Keynote Speech Get access Peter Gay Peter Gay Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 53, Issue 1, January 2008, Pages 117–126, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/53.1.117 Published: 01 January 2008

A VERY FREUDIAN AFFAIR: ERICH FROMM, PETER SWALES AND THE FUTURE OF PSYCHOANALYTIC HISTORIOGRAPHY

Despite steadfast denials by Ernest Jones, Peter Gay and Paul Roazen (among others), a recent discovery by Franz Maciejewski renders it reasonably certain that Freud had an affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays. While this discovery vindicates certain claims made by the controversial Freud scholar, Peter Swales, other claims of his vis-a-vis Freud's personality and ideas are open to doubt. Meanwhile, the reception of Swales's ideas, and indeed the whole controversy about Freud's love life, provide ample confirmation of many of Erich Fromm's prescient theses about Freud's personality and the politics and historiography of psychoanalysis.

New York Transfixed: Notes on the Expression of Fear

This article is about nine photographs and what may be seen in them (Figures 1–9). The images are part of a much larger collection conceived of and organized by a group of four friends—Alice Rose George, Gilles Peress, Michael Shulan, and Charles Traub— shortly after 11 September 2001. Their idea was to document what had happened and what was still occurring on the streets of New York City that infamous fall. The group also decided that this makeshift project should be open to ‘‘anybody and everybody’’ and they sent out word as widely as possible that any photograph submitted on this topic would be displayed in an exhibition at Michael Shulan’s SoHo gallery. Figure 1. Unknown photographer (#3029 from here is New York: a democracy of photographs).

The trauma of genocide

The trauma of genocide

The Sphinx on the Table: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection and the Development of Psychoanalysis

The Sphinx on the Table: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection and the Development of Psychoanalysis

Freud's Egypt: Mummies and M/others

I cannot imagine that Sigmund Freud saw Karl Freund's 1932 film, The Mummy in which Boris Karloff gives a subtle and moving portrayal of a man driven by love to defy death.1 Although Freud's last a...

Modernism, Dead or Alive

Modernism: The Lure of Heresy by Peter Gay NewYork: W.W. Norton, 2007. 610 pages The word modernism no longer calls to mind a simple singular aesthetic or a particular set of ideas. To think about what it means is to ask: Whose modernism? What kind? When? Barnett Newman and others of his generation believed that modern art is not about beauty or retinal gratification, but this was by no means the view of Virginia Woolf or Henri Matisse. Marcel Duchamp regarded the habit of distinguishing between good and bad taste as ridiculous. But no such animus inspired the practice of writers and artists like Thomas Mann or Giorgio Morandi. The poet-critic Randall Jarrell could praise the poems of William Carlos Williams for their freshness and humor and fantasy (82), yet also celebrate the passion for philosophy and order (78) in the masterpieces of Wallace Stevens. W. H. Auden saw no reason to refrain from introducing politics into his work, but other writers were reluctant--often on principle--to do so. If modernism is not the name of a practice or a set of principles, it also no longer signifies a particular era. In his new book, Peter Gay operates on the assumption that nineteenth-century writers like Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky were modernists, and he contends that modernism is a phenomenon that comes and goes, dying out for a time and starting up again, as it did in the middle of the twentieth century with the galvanizing appearance of works by Jackson Pollock, Gunter Grass, and other modernist artists. To suppose that modernism is the name of a coherent movement that began and ended in the first 40 or 50 years of the last century seems no longer possible for most cultural historians. Of course the term itself continues to suggest a number of identifiable features, however various the works in which these features are ostensibly embodied. A novel lacking in self-consciousness or any discernable preoccupation with form would not qualify as a work, even if it appeared in the 1920s or 30s when Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, and others were defining the parameters of fiction. We may admire the work of a painter like Lucian Freud and acknowledge the freshness, originality, and power of his portraiture, but we do not regard him as a artist, so little does he seem to strain against the limits of the painter's available resources, so relatively straightforward do his intentions seem. Straightforward in what sense? In the sense that he is not, or does not seem to be, principally interested in questions about his medium or troubled by the relation of his work to the standard high-modernist masterpieces that dominated the period in which he came of age. We expect genuine works to entertain such preoccupations and to be in some degree experimental--that is, to be asking themselves at every turn what they are doing and thinking about the limits and possibilities peculiar to their medium. When in Madame Bovary Flaubert briefly interrupts his narrative to reflect on the linguistic resources available to him as a novelist and complains of their inadequacy, he seems to us to be self-conscious in the way of the modernist, however much his work confirms in other respects his status as a realist writer. The preoccupation with form and medium will vary in emphasis and intensity from one to another, but where it is entirely absent, the writer will inevitably belong to some other dispensation. Is this kind of preoccupation a good thing? Obviously, the commitment to the experimental, like the habit of self-consciousness, is not bound to produce masterpieces. The annals of modernism are filled with tenth-rate experiments and pretentious, stultifyingly tedious, ostentatiously self-conscious works. But modernism was, at its best, a bracing idea. It seemed, for a time, the enemy of complacency in art and thought. …

Reaffirming the Enlightenment

January/February 2007 · Historically Speaking Reaffirming the Enlightenment John Robertson The 18th-century Enlightenment, it seems, is now back in fashion among scholars on both sides of the Adantic. During the 1980s and for much of the 1990s it lay behind the front lines of scholarly activity. Good work was being done in specific areas, but those looking for an account of the Enlightenment as a whole had to refer back to Peter Gay's two-volume synthesis, The Enlightenment : An Interpretation (1966, 1969). Despite its qualities, Gay's book seemed dated, having been dismissed by critics such as Robert Darnton for its supposed elitism and neglect of social history . By the early 1970s it was the social history of ideas that set the agenda. Even if Darnton himself never denied the existence of the Enlightenment , he and others redirected the focus of research onto what he christened the "low life of literature," on the grounds that the latter milieu did far more to foster the intellectual climate of the French Revolution. The impression that the Enlightenment had fallen from grace was reinforced by the postmodern critique of the "Enlightenment project ." The idea that there had been an "Enlightenment project" was always a philosopher 's rather than a historian's construction. Those who adopted diis view assumed diat Enlightenment philosophers had sought to base all morality on reason and went on to charge the Enlightenment as a whole with die deadly sins of universalism, Western triumphalism, and a belief in social engineering—all of which led more or less direcdy to the great disasters of the 20th century. Scholars still sympadietic to die Enlightenment found diemselves on die back foot, trying (as in the title of one thoughtful collection) to answer the "postmodern question": "What's left of Enlightenment?"' As is often the case with shifts in scholarly fashion , there is no simple reason for the recovery of the Enlightenment's reputation. It began before the upsurge in concern over religious extremism in the contemporary world and the fear that Islam is at war with the legacy of die Enlightenment. As good a signal as any of this recovery was Robert Darnton 's—to his admirers unexpected—defense of die high Enlightenment in the New York Review of Books in 1997. In diis essay Darnton construed the Enlightenment as a concerted campaign on behalf of liberty and happiness, the latter condition exemplified by George Washington's false teeth as a remedy for toothache.2 Another signal was the appearance of a whole series of collaborative encyclopedias and dictionaries of the Enlightenment—indisputably an Enlightenment project, but also an indication, now as in the 18th century, of publishers' anticipation "Imprimerie en lettres, l'opération de la casse." Illustration from Diderot's Encyclopédie. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-110399]. of a market.' Their confidence growing, scholars began to reclaim the Enlightenment for causes to which its critics had supposed it irredeemably hostile : die groundbreaking collaboration that produced Women, Gender, and Enlightenment, edited by Barbara Taylor and Sarah Knott (2005), may well prove the most significant new beginning in 21st-century Enlightenment studies. Yet the recovery of the Enlightenment's standing has come at a price. The ideas, places, and people that scholars want to associate with Enlightenment are so diverse that it has become difficult to think in terms of a single Enlightenment . "The" Enlightenment, its unity and coherence secured by the definite article, has been replaced by multiple "Enlightenments," which may be thought of as forming a "family" but which are impossible to homogenize into a single object of study. There are good reasons for this tendency. The traditional equation of Enlightenment, les lumières, with a period of French literature has long since been abandoned, by literary scholars as well as historians . Supporters of Enlightenment were active in places far from Paris: in Italy and Germany, in Spain and Russia, in Scodand and the North American colonies. Many of these visited Paris, of course; but they did so to recharge their intellectual batteries and return home, not because they were in flight from lands of permanent darkness. They read the texts of...

Happiness: a history

Today, human beings tend to think of happiness as a natural right. But they haven t always felt this way. For the ancient Greeks, happiness meant virtue. For the Romans, it implied prosperity and divine favor. For Christians, happiness was synonymous with God. Throughout history, happiness has been equated regularly with the highest human calling, the most perfect human state. Yet it s only within the past two hundred years that human beings have begun to think of happiness as not just an earthly possibility but also as an earthly entitlement, even an obligation. In this sweeping new book, historian Darrin M. McMahon argues that our modern belief in happiness is the product of a dramatic revolution in human expectations carried out since the eighteenth century.In the tradition of works by Peter Gay and Simon Schama, Happiness draws on a multitude of sources, including art and architecture, poetry and scripture, music and theology, and literature and myth, to offer a sweeping intellectual history of man s most elusive yet coveted goal.

German Popular Enlightenment in the Russian Empire: Peter Ernst Wilde and Catherine II

SEER, Vol.84, No. 2, April2006 German Popular Enlightenment in the Russian Empire: Peter Ernst Wilde and Catherine II ROGER BARTLETT THEproblem of the nature and definition of 'the Enlightenment'has engendereda wide range of responsesamong historians.Some scholars approached it essentially as a movement of ideas, the manifestation of changing consciousness,concepts and values among the eighteenthcentury European intellectual elite ideas particularly leading towardsfreedom in all its varied meanings.' The locusclassicus for such views was France, from where allegedly lesLumieres spread out further acrossthe Continent. The focuswas on big names, big ideas, big books perhaps the most famous of all being the Encyclopedie.2 Other scholars have laid different emphases. British historians, especially Roy Porter, have brought Britain to the fore as a primary centre of the phenomenon, and some researchershave laid greaterstresson national variationsand individuality,speakingabout European Enlightenments in the plural.3More attention has been drawn, too, to the social and Roger Bartlett is Professor Emeritus of Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London and Special Professor in the School of Modern Languages, University of Nottingham. An earlier version of this article was read to the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia at its meeting inJanuary 2005. I am most grateful for comments received there, and to Simon Dixon, Isabel de Madariaga, Gary Marker and Claus Scharf for further generous comment and advice. 1 For instance, Paul Hazard, La Orise dela conscience europkenne (I680-I7I5), Paris, I935; Peter Gay, TheEnlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols, London, I967-70. 2 Following Chambers' Cyclopaedia. The eighteenth century was the first great age of modern encyclopaedias, also the time when the term itself became established. Besides the first major German encyclopaedia,J. H. Zedler's great Grof,e vollstandige Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften undKunste ... (64 + 4 vols, Halle-Leipzig, I732-54), Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie oudictionnaire raisonne dessciences, desartset desmetiers (35 vols, Paris,I75I-80), and the Encyclopaedia Britannica(initially 3 vols, Edinburgh, I768-7I, but succeeding editions expanded rapidly), the first printed Chinese encyclopaedia appeared, the enormous Gujin tushujicheng ('Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings from the Earliest to Present Times'), Beijing, 1726. It covers some 8oo,ooo pages and uses more than ioo million characters. 3 R. Porter and M. Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context,Cambridge, io8i; S. Juttner and J. Schlobach (eds), Europaische Aujklarung(en). Einheit und nationaleVieyfalt, Hamburg, I992 (hereafter, Europdische Aujklddrung(en)); Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britainandthe Makingof theModernWorld,London, 2000 (hereafter, Enlightenment). ROGER BARTLETT 257 economicunderpinnings of the spreadof newideas,whetherin classbasedanalysessuchasJurgenHabermas 's thesisof the 'publicsphere' or in investigations of the book-trade andpublishing industry. Anotherpartof thismorerecenttrendemphasizes whathasbeen called the popularEnlightenment attemptsto relate the great abstract ideasto realeveryday life,or to usethemin practical waysto improvesociety.Alreadyat the beginningof the eighteenthcentury, thinkers wereanticipating KarlMarxinwantingnotjustto understand the world,but also to changeit.4As the centurywore on, a major development in European societieswastheeffortby benevolent membersoftheeducatedclasses privatepeopleindividually orin groups, or throughofficialagencies to spreadtheir light more widely throughsociety,to reachdownto the commonpeopleandhelpraise them out of ignorance,superstition and the commonills and vices of theirdailyexistence.Such socialactivistsactedfroma varietyof motives rationalcalculation,socialengineering,philanthropic or religious altruism. Therewasoftena strongelementofdutyandobligation ,moralor religious or both.The ethicalmodelof the 'enlightened patriot'couldoffera wayof life and approachto socialactionwhich constituted effectively a secularalternative to religious vocation.5 PopularEnlightenment alsoaccordedperfectly withthe leadingcameralist andphysiocratic theoriesof statecraft of the latereighteenthcentury; nordiditconflictwiththeideasofAdamSmithwhichbecameinfluentialaroundthe turnof the century.It combinedcameralist raison d'etat andbeliefin rationalordering of societywithpatriotic zealforcountry andfatherland, andwithChristian charitytowardsthe lessfortunate. Holger Boning,a recenthistorianof this phenomenonin the Germanies ,dieVolksaujkldrung, hastracedthe evolutionof sucheighteenthcenturyEnlightenedtheoryand practicein severalstages:from the abstractintellectualEnlightenmentto the 'economicand publicly useful' (gemeinniitzig-dkonomischen) phase, concernedparticularlywith agrarianand medical improvement,and throughto the 'popular Enlightenment' andits growingconcernforpopulareducation.6 This practical andactivistapproach to thespreadof Enlightenment became 4 Porter, Enlightenment, esp. chap. 3. 5 Discussed in the context of our area by Annelies Grasshof, 'Zur Mentalitat livlandischer Aufldarungsschriftsteller. Der Patriotismus August Wilhelm Hupels', in H. Ischreyt (ed.), ZentrenderAujkldrung, 2: KICnigsberg und Riga, Tubingen, 1995, pp. 2I7-35 (hereafter, 'Zur Mentalitat livlandischer'). 6 Holger Boning, 'Gemeinnutzig-okonomische Aufkldarung und Volksaufklarung. Bemerkungen zum Selbstverstandnis und zur Wirkung der praktisch-popularen Aufkldarungim deutschsprachigen Raum' (hereafter, 'Gemeinntitzig-okonomische Aufkldarung'), injJuttner, Schlobach, Europaische Aujklarung(en), pp. 2I8-48; see also, Das Volkim...

History, historians, & autobiography

Though history and autobiography both claim to tell true stories about the past, historians have traditionally rejected first-person accounts as subjective and therefore unreliable. What then, asks Jeremy D. Popkin in History, Historians, and Autobiography, are we to make of the ever-increasing number of professional historians who are publishing stories of their own lives? And how is this recent development changing the nature of history-writing, the historical profession, and the genre of autobiography? Drawing on the theoretical work of contemporary critics of autobiography, as well as the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Popkin reads the autobiographical classics of Edward Gibbons and Henry Adams and the memoirs of contemporary historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Peter Gay, Jill Ker Conway, and many others. He reveals the contributions that historians' life stories make to our understanding of the human experience. Historians' autobiographies, he shows, reveal how scholars arrive at their vocations, the difficulties of writing about modern professional life, and the ways in which personal stories can add to our understanding of historical events such as war, political movements, and the traumas of the Holocaust. An engrossing overview of the way historians view themselves and their profession, this work will be of interest to readers concerned with the ways in which we understand the past, as well as anyone interested in the art of life-writing.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

The Vertical File: Freudiana

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article History NotesFull AccessThe Vertical File: FreudianaLucy D. Ozarin, M.D., M.P.H.Lucy D. OzarinSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., M.P.H.Published Online:1 Oct 2004https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.39.19.0390036The APA Library, which became a library of psychiatric history since APA moved its headquarters to Arlington, Va., has maintained since its inception close to 50 years ago an extensive collection of materials on psychiatric subjects and individuals. The material is drawn from newspaper clippings, magazine articles, brochures, and publications of significant psychiatric events. One of the largest files is labeled “Freud.” Among the contents of the Freud file are extensive photographs and descriptions of the Freud Museum in London.Freud's home and office at Bergasse 19 in Vienna, where he lived from 1891 to 1938, is marked only with a plaque. In March 1938 Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and attacks on Jews began immediately. Within days Freud's flat was searched, and Anna Freud was held for an entire day by the Gestapo for questioning. With the support of powerful friends, Freud managed to escape. The Nazis allowed Freud to take with him the major furnishings of his office and library. Of special interest is his office, where he saw patients.Just before Freud was spirited to London, August Aishorn, a Viennese psychoanalyst, arranged for a photographer, Edmond Engelmann, to take pictures of the office. The pictures show the famous couch with an armchair at the head, a large desk, and an extensive collection of more than 2,000 antiquities, mainly of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman origins. Several authors have hypothesized that the antiquities represented suppressed memories to Freud: “the retrieved memory was like the unearthed ancient object.” A photograph of Freud's waiting room shows an armless sofa and a small table with chairs around it. Framed pictures and manuscripts hang on the walls.Engelmann's photos were located with difficulty and eventually came to Anna Freud. Freud's office at 20 Maresfield Gardens in London was set up as a replica of his office in Vienna. Anna Freud lived in the house until she died in 1982. The house is now a museum and has been open to the public since 1986.An exhibit of some of Freud's antiquities was held at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1975 and toured the United States for three years (1989-92). A Freud centenary exhibit was presented by the American Psychoanalytic Association at APA's annual meeting in Chicago in 1956 and at the Academy of Medicine also that year. An accompanying brochure shows photos of Freud at age 8 with his father, at age 16 with his mother, with his wife in 1886, and numerous photos of his later years. The brochure also lists Freud's publications.In 1939 the New York Psychiatric Institute acquired 800 volumes from Freud's library. These were books Freud had sent to a local bookseller when he left Vienna and were advertised for sale for $500. By chance, Dr. Jacob Schatsky, the institute's librarian, saw the ad and was able to buy the books, most of which are old and bound in leather.In 1976 Engelmann's photos of Freud's home and office were published by Basic Books with an introduction by Peter Gay. The book was reviewed for the New York Times “Book World” by Anthony Storr, who found it of interest that Freud's office contained photographs of two of his pupils, Marie Bonaparte and Lou Andreas Salome, as well as Yvette Guilbert and Toulouse Lautrec.More information on the Freud Museum is posted online at<www.freud.org.uk/>.▪ ISSUES NewArchived

Berlioz: Past, Present, Future: Bicentenary Essays (review)

Berlioz. Past, Present, Future. Bicentenary Essays. Edited by Peter Bloom. (Eastman Studies in Music.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003. [xviii, 212 p. ISBN 158046-047-X. $70.]. Music examples, illustrations, index. Hector Berliox's bicentennial in 2003 witnessed a large number of celebrations. Besides exhibitions, festivals, concert series, and opera productions around the world, official conferences-including those initiated by the Comite International Hector Herlioz-had already started by 2001, considering and reconsidering every topic imaginable, referring to the composer and context, music, personality, reception in different countries, relationships to other composers, artists, and writers. At the beginning of this series of conferences was the one at Smith College; its papers are presented in this volume, edited the highest scholarly accuracy by Peter Bloom. Among the myriad of publications emanating from this jubilee, the present tome is worth considering for some new and uncommon perspectives on research. It focuses foremost on historical context, starting and times, then looking at understanding of history and earlier music, as well as presence in the musical world around 1900 and even today. The authors that Bloom presents in this volume generally avoid the popular type of and . papers which discuss who influenced and who was influenced by him. Only one article refers to this type of topic, but does so in a very individual way. The title is Berlioz's Berlioz, and autobiographical writings in mind, one cannot negate the impression that this reflection upon and Berlioz may be the only appropriate approach to the composer. This article comes from the Sigmund Freud biographer and Yale historian Peter Gay. His article undertakes an investigation of personality as the composer himself defined it, focusing on attitude towards women, politics, and art. Gay's most striking thesis is obsessive pursuit of chosen artistic path. belief was fueled by an amazingly strong selfconsciousness and a love of music that can only be understood as a reflection of love for himself. Moreover, this love of music was erotic: Gay discovers that, according to descriptions in the memoirs, his appetite for composing came along physical passion when he was twelve (p. 8). The fight for art, as wanted to have this term understood, was a fight for own existence. In a letter, confessed that he would fight for success with teeth and through gates that refuse to open. And he concluded, bitter awareness of possibly useless undertaking, that it is possible that the day [of success] will come when I have no longer teeth and nails (p. 5). Gay points out that obsessive approach to the arts was nourished by opposition that came not only from the public, but also from family. Opposing father's insistence on becoming a physician was a critical challenge that seemed to leave no choice between abandoning ideals or dying of hunger. political and contemporary awareness of political altitudes interest a number of contributors. This topic is extremely complex and requires further basic research as Bloom appropriately states in foreword. It has even become a matter of current politics. When the French government declared in 2000 its intention to translate remains to the Pantheon, many expressed concern about seeming appreciation for Napoleonic imperialism. As a result, the year 2003 passed without accomplishing this overdue gesture of honor. This incident-as a matter of collective consciousness of historical and current political values and strategies-forms the background of Katherine Kolb's article. She extracts political views by analyzing some of major fictional stories and their autobiographical references. …