BOOKS
327
MORE PSYCHOHISTORY
FREU D FOR HISTORIANS. By Peter Gay.
Oxford University Press.
$17.95.
In
his largely autobiographical preface Peter Gay tells us
that he first became interested in psychoanalysis "as a system of
ideas and an auxiliary discipline" some thirty years ago, and that he
entered the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis as a
research candidate ten years ago, undergoing a didactic analysis
lasting several years. Professor Gay is, therefore, not an analyst
turned historian, nor indeed an historian turned analyst, but a
lifelong historian convinced that certain psychoanalytical ideas can
and should be used by historians to illuminate the past. As a result,
as he himself says, he occupies a vulnerable, threatened position; the
history establishment is on the whole hostile towards psychohistory
while "most psychoanalysts can scarcely repress their suspicions of
what they think of, a little grudgingly, as applied analysis. The
psychoanalytic historian must be prepared to face skepticism from
Freud's followers almost as much as from his denigrators."
To the present reviewer, who could at a pinch claim to be an
historian turned analyst, it appears that the problems faced by Pro–
fessor Gay and other psychohistorians arise from two facts; first, that
there are so many pasts and therefore so many branches and kinds of
history; and, second, that human nature is so various and variegated
that psychoanalysis, to the extent it has achieved a conceptual
framework that reflects this variety, has generated so many ideas. As
a result, anyone venturing into the troubled waters of psychohistory
has to discover and select which psychoanalytical ideas are relevant
and appropriate to the period or branch of history he wishes to
study. (Presumably an analyst turned historian might proceed op–
positely and select a period of history which seemed to him to ex–
emplify with peculiar clarity some psychoanalytical idea he wished
to popularize and illustrate. This is indeed what Erik Erikson did in
Young Man Luther.)
Now Professor Gay is at present engaged in "a study of
nineteenth-century bourgeois culture from a psychoanalytical
perspective"
(The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud;
six volumes,
of which two,
Education of the Senses
and
The Tender Passion ,
have
