The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Vol. 1 the Education of the Senses; Vol. 2, the Tender Passion: By Peter Gay. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, 1986. 534 pp., 490 pp.

In contemporary psychoanalysis Peter Gay occupies a unique position. He was already a full professor of history at Yale and the

author of a number of distinguished books when he undertook training at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute.

The books under review are the fruits of this experience. A third book, Freud for Historians,1 has also appeared, and a biography of Freud is promised. These books are written with an enthusiasm about the contribution psychoanalysis can make to history that is familiar to us from the writings of the psychoanalytic pioneers but is rarely found in contemporary social science.

The impact of Freud is already discernible in the division between a book on sex and another on love. The theory of the two currents developed by Freud in 1905 organizes the material. By the arrangement of the material the author tells us that failure to combine the tender and the sexual currents, which Freud said characterized many neurotics, was characteristic of the nineteenth century as a whole.

The proclaimed aim is to integrate psychoanalysis with history so as to produce not psychohistory but history informed by psychoanalysis. The building blocks will be those of Freud—love, aggression, and conflict. But the edifice will be cultural history, the bourgeois experience from 1835, when Victoria ascended the throne, to 1914, when the guns of August ended an era, damaging the rule of the bourgeoisie beyond repair. Freud is his mentor, but Gay is also an ego psychologist in the tradition of Hartmann. He wants to give equal attention to the pressures of such realities as urbanization and the introduction of the railroads and to the influence of wishes, whether they are acknowledged by the subject of the historian or not.

The core of Freud's theory of society is the "fundamental idea that all civilization … extracts sacrifices from the instinctual drives, and forces the scaling down, postponement, or surrender of certain gratifications" (Vol. 1,