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A biographical analysis of a major historical figure necessarily focuses on central themes and leans on major events to build an understanding of the direction, the meaning, the enduring impact of the life. In the wake of his definitive Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay has presented us with some additional anecdotes and deeper looks at some more peripheral areas of Freud's existence. These outtakes from Gay's earlier work further illuminate Freud, the man.
Freud: Explorations and Entertainments, Gay's “final farewell” to Freud, takes us on excursions through the intricate byways of Freud's mind. We are provided with maps which help us to travel from the small paths of passions to the royal road which leads to the discovery of Sigmund Freud, the whole man. Our enjoyable tour of some of Freud's interests and his pleasures adds to our understanding of the man and his thought.
Our journey begins with the question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays. While many cultured Viennese of the day had some interest in this popular issue, Gay describes Freud's obsession with the identification of Shakespeare as the Earl of Oxford as “one of the two most eccentric commitments of his life,” the other being the identification of Moses as an Egyptian. He speculates that as he grew older, Freud suffered the “torment of the incomplete,” as his hope failed that the accumulation of his theoretical ideas would bind into a coherent whole. Perhaps this is one reason why in this matter that “had always perplexed him to distraction,” he succumbed to a persuasive hypothesis by an obscure English author, John Thomas Looney