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This is a short and peculiar book, all the more odd since the author is a professional historian. It grew out of three lectures he gave at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, in which he tells us that he “had a single argument to make.” In fleshing out the lectures for publication, Gay retained his singleness of purpose, despite the fact that at its best history communicates multiplicity and diversity: He wanted to reflect “on Freud's atheism and on its meaning for his creation, psychoanalysis.”
Gay has undergone formal psychoanalytic training in New Haven and is now an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. But instead of his dual set of training experiences having led him to a genuinely broad effort at encouraging interdisciplinary cooperation, it seems to me that Gay sees himself as trying to lead a Counter-Reformation within the history of psychoanalysis. If others within the last generation, ever since the publication of Ernest Jones's biography of Freud, have sought to show signs of the master that the more politic of the loyal Freudians tried to disguise, Gay appears to be an apologist putting what he conceives as the best face on everything connected to Freud. In the past, other famous intellectuals, such as Stanley Edgar Hyman and Lionel Trilling, were eager to accomplish the same objective; but it is remarkable that Gay is undertaking his task now, after so much of the revisionary (or “post-Freudian”) water has already gone over the dam.
As with others who define themselves as organizational loyalists, and so-called defenders of Freud, what Gay is up to is in my judgment not only unnecessary but fundamentally wrong-headed. Gay insists on the positive significance of Freud's atheism; if psychoanalysis arose precisely because of its lack of contamination by religious thinking, and Freud's Jewish background, then the implication seems to be that the standing of psychoanalysis as a neutral science has been enhanced. Such would appear to be t