Freud: A Life For Our Time: Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1988, xx + 810 pp., $30.00

At best, psychoanalysis is structured and detached autobiography. Gay's biography of Freud was one of the most moving reading experiences I've had in a long time. Perhaps the boundaries of projective identification were loosened as I took up the task of an examined life in Freud's Vienna, his East European roots, and, most of all, Freud the Jew—Eine Jude. How and why did a Godless Jew discover psychoanalysis? Perhaps the answer concerns his marginality—a Jew examining his inner and outer being during the declining Habsburg Empire where he saw, felt, and raged at a feudal and bourgeois culture that had repression at its core, hypocrisy at its roots, and anti-Semitism as its perverse élan vital. Austria was slouching toward Nazism, Vienna was becoming one of the graveyards of Europe—this despite a renaissance in the arts and sciences which was superficially liberal at best. Freud, ever the realist or pessimist, early sensed this destructive course, first in his rage and humiliation when his father's hat was knocked off by an anti-Semite (Freud was 8 years old), and then in his ironic comment about the Gestapo in 1938 when he was ransomed to England, where he spent the last 1¹/₂ years of his life: “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone” (p. 628). Yet, in Gay's previous book,