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The time of naive history which presented to readers and taught students "only" the facts and dates is gone forever. All historians now agree that we must seek the whys and wherefores, the explanations of how things developed in a given way and came to be as they are. Historians do not agree on what kinds of explanations are acceptable, which of the social, behavioral, or humanistic sciences are appropriate as aids to historical research and understanding.
Peter Gay is a distinguished cultural historian of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century who vigorously proposes that historians turn to and use Freud and psychoanalysis to inform their history. He is committed to the classical Freud. He does not play with divergent psychoanalytic schools and modifications of clinical theory. Rather, he finds the versatility and the awareness of social context historians require in the original works of the master.
Gay's strategy of argument is rhetorical—he constructs the historian's defenses against listening to the unconscious as six Dantean concentric rings of intellectual fortifications. He then penetrates and beats down one by one the objections to employing psychodynamic insights in history. The arguments of common sense, technical difficulty, static ahistoricity, culture specificity, of irrelevancy for social and group behavior, are taken up, worked over, and laid to rest, largely from Freud's own writings.
The reservations about psychoanalysis among the historical guild are many and vigorously argued. The world of the unconscious is subversive of reason and at home with contradictions, ambivalences, and omnipresent conflicts. As Gay proposes: "Yielding to the persuasions of Freud will necessarily force historians to change, often drastically, the way they do history, force them to dispense with prized convictions and to revise favorite conclusions" (p. 212).
Gay persuades, polemicizes, cajoles his profession of the efficacy and benefits of Freudian insights t