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Good books are the most difficult to review, and Peter Gay's new life of Freud is superlatively good, in fact—considering its scope and complexity—almost flawless. After Freud's death fifty years ago, several decades elapsed before Ernest Jones completed his great 3-volume biography. That monumental work stood alone for another decade, but since the early 1970s we have been immersed in a flood of historical writing about Freud, and analysis that would have astonished and dismayed Freud himself. The flood is still rising, and along with it an insatiable audience of general readers has emerged, seemingly interested in the most arcane facets of the analytic past. Specialized books and monographs are reviewed in newspapers and popular magazines, and fierce controversies about historical details fill their letter-columns.
Besides these controversies, a vast amount of new information about Freud and his followers has been published, first by professional historians such as Schorske, William McGrath and Gay himself. Then came memoirs by analysts such as Helene Deutsch, Richard Sterba and others, and one biography of Freud by Max Schur (1972), who had been Freud's personal physician. There has been brilliant journalism by Janet Malcolm on the unlikely topic of the Freud archives, provocative attacks on Freud by Jeffrey Masson and others, and a specialized, quirky interpretation by Frank Sulloway. All this intensifies general interest in analytic history, at a time when analytic practice is dwindling, at least in the United States.
In this setting, Gay's first comprehensive biography of Freud in thirty years is an act of great courage, as in crossing a minefield of potential controversy, and above all an incalculable service to other students of analysis, by synthesizing all the new data. Myriads of details, hitherto unknown facts and contradictory versions of the same event have been recovered from books, articles and unpublished archives, sifted and judged, and woven