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The provocative thesis underlying Sander Gilman's two new books-The Case of Sigmund Freud and Freud, Race, and Gender—is that Freud's creation of psychoanalysis was profoundly influenced by his ambivalent feelings toward being a Jew in a virulently anti-Semitic culture. Gilman, the author or editor of over thirty books, was, until recently, Goldwin Smith Professor of Humane Studies at Cornell University and professor of the history of psychiatry at Cornell Medical College. Now teaching at the University of Chicago, where he is professor of German, of the history of science, of psychiatry, and of Jewish Studies, he is one of the world's leading interdisciplinary scholars, the U.S. counterpart to the great French cultural historian Michel Foucault.
Gilman probably knows more about the complex interrelationship between psychoanalysis and culture than anyone in the world. Blessed with an encyclopedic memory, Gilman, like Freud before him, seems to have read just about everything ever written on a wide range of subjects, and yet he never parades his vast erudition. To give but one small example, numerous psychoanalytic scholars have, in Talmudic fashion, pored over every word in the twenty-four volume Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Gilman has gone beyond this; he has examined all the materials Freud cites in all his references. Consequently, Gilman is in a unique position to tell us not only what Freud knew, but how he came to this knowledge.
In addition to reading and mastering Freud's monumental writings and the history of psychoanalysis, Gilman seems to have read (in the original language) virtually every medical, philosophical, anthropological, literary, and political treatise published in the last century and a half. The footnotes in the two Freud books, both published in 1993, are over 100 pages long, containing thousands of bibliographical citations. Although