328
PARTISAN REVIEW
already appeared), and I see no reason to doubt that the particular
set of psychoanalytical ideas he recommends to the attention of
historians in
Freudfor Historians
is in fact the appropriate one for his
particular enterprise, but he is, I think, wrong in implying, as he
does, that it is the set required by all historians or even that it con–
stitutes the central core of psychoanalytical thinking.
The psychoanalytical concepts Gay wishes to propagate among
historians are roughly those which Freud developed in ' his later
writings from 1920 onwards and from which contemporary
psychoanalytical ego-psychology derives: the idea that the mind is a
tripartite structure, consisting of the id, which contains two groups
of instinctual drives, the sexual and the aggressive, the ego which is
adapted towards the outside world, and the superego, which con–
tains precipitates of parental and other authority figures; the idea
that groups are held together by the identifications of their members
with one another and with an idealized paternal leader; and the idea
that the ego uses a variety of defense mechanisms to protect itself
from being overwhelmed by sexual and aggressive drives and that
civilization is based on repression and sublimation of these instinc–
tual drives.
Although these Freudian concepts are clearly and often
elegantly described, I doubt whether Gay's presentation of them will
fire the imagination of historians in the way that he hopes it will.
This is largely because he fails to give adequate accounts of a
number of earlier and more basic Freudian concepts without which
Freud's ego psychology appears static and unimaginative; Gay has
little to say about fantasy, symbolism, sublimation, guilt, and anxie–
ty, and I doubt whether any reader of
Freudfor Historians
not already
familiar with psychoanalysis would grasp that, in Freud's view, the
id and the ego function in entirely different and incompatible ways,
the former using images and symbols ordered according to what he
called the primary processes (condensation and displacement) which
ignore the categories of space and time, the latter using words
ordered discursively according to the rules of logic and syntax. Nor
would he discover that many contemporary analysts think Freud
assumed too sharp an antithesis between the ego and the id and their
respective modes of fuctioning.
In concentrating so exclusively on one particular phase in
Freud's thinking-and indeed in entitling his book
Freud for
Historians,
not
Psychoanalysis for Historians-Professor
Gay has, I
