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Psychohistorian Peter Gay's The Cultivation of Hatred comprises the third volume of a sweeping Freudian study of the emotional lives of the 19th-century European bourgeoisie. The first volume, The Education of the Senses (1984) deals with sexuality; the second, The Tender Passion (1986) with love. Gay bases his view of his subject on what he—like Freud—sees as the basic components of all human experience: love, aggression, and conflict. In The Cultivation of Hatred there is the acting out of Gobineau and the race theorists—“all this slander in the name of scholarship” (p. 79) and the sublimation exemplified by H. G. Wells, “a model of how to bridle that aggression and make it into a visible instrument of democratic politics” (p. 116).
Gay finds plenty of confirmation for his view of humanity in his material, but not just because he (and Freud) are simply right about their view of human nature. As he puts it at the beginning of his appendix on “Theories of Aggression,” “the nineteenth century was virtually unanimous in seeing the human as an aggressive animal” (p. 529). Freud and psychoanalysis were products of the culture Gay studies. Indeed, Gay sees the 19th century leading almost ineluctably to Freud (and to the women's movement). So a Freudian view of 19th-century bourgeois culture has great potential precisely because it is an artifact of that culture. But that—apart from the problem of teleology—raises the question of its