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Peter Gay tells us that although his Freud: A Life for Our Time was “in the making for a long time,” it only took him “two and a half short and intense years…to write it” (p. 781). Since the book is such a long one, most researchers might question what could result from such a relatively brief writing stint. In fact, the book is smoothly written, and Gay evidently had his eye on the most general reading audience. Doubtless many people will pick up this book as a good one volume introduction, as they once turned to Ronald W. Clark's (1980) excellent Freud: The Man and the Cause. Clark made no pretensions to scholarly originality; he simply sought to popularize the latest findings about Freud. In my view Clark's aims were remarkably well fulfilled. But Peter Gay had far greater ambitions, as evidenced by his lengthy Bibliographical Essay (to which I will return later) at the end of his book.
Gay tells us that he “relied on my historian's professional distance to preserve me from the idealization that Freud thought the biographer's inescapable fate” (p. 781). Already we must be wary of Gay's line of thought, since he has seriously misunderstood the complexity of motivation that Freud thought underlay the biographical enterprise. Freud repeatedly ascribed to biographers ambivalent motives, those which denigrate as well as idealize, so it does seem surprising for Gay to isolate only one side of things. He is in fact right to