431 - Freud for Historians

Freud for Historians
By Peter Gay
New York, Oxford University Press, 1985. 252 pp. $17.95.

Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History at Yale, is one of the best known interpreters of modern European intellectual history writing in

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English today. Freud for Historians completes a trilogy on historiography which began with Style in History (1974) and continued through Art and Act (1976). Here Gay wants to show that "the social psychology that [Sigmund] Freud left largely implicit in his papers ... [can] work for the study of culture, of its origins, its course, and its irrepressible conflicts." Thus, in the thirty years war historiographers have waged over the appropriateness of the psychoanalytic interpretation of history, Gay tries to penetrate the "six concentric rings of intellectual fortifications mobilized against the Freudian assault" as part of "seizing the rounded essence of the past" in "the aspiration toward total history."

Gay opens with his understanding of why historians generally have rejected psychoanalysis as an "auxiliary discipline." Then he argues that historians frequently are psychologists without formal psychology, amateurs both in their opposition to Freud and in their attempts to explicate what Marc Bloch termed "men's 'secret needs of the heart.'" E. H. Carr, G. R. Elton, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., J. H. Hexter, and Jacques Barzun all receive negative criticism in this regard.

To be sure, Gay is sensitive to the charges that Freud was smug and arrogant, with a fixation on morbidity. In response, he seeks to interpret the founder of psychoanalysis and to cite Freud's own disclaimers about the finality of his conclusions. Nevertheless, Gay is convinced that Freud delineated some primal truths about universal human nature.

The burden of this book is carried by its second half. Gay is aware of the danger of a simplistic use of psychoanalysis in historical interpretation. The worlds of psychoanalysis and of history are, and ought to remain, worlds apart. Still, the two worlds can enrich one another. Psychoanalysts can help historians deepen their understanding of motivation; historians can help psychoanalysts widen their appreciation of the social context in which persons interact.

The main point of this book is that psychoanalysis must be used not only in writing biography, but also in "the exploration of collective experience." Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther (1958), which "really founded psychohistory," "is psychoanalytic biography at its most felicitous." E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), and John P. Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witch-Craft and the Culture of Early New England (1982), are early and recent examples of how psychoanalytic insights can be used judiciously in writing cultural history. On the other hand, E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class (1963) fails in this regard because the author's personal attitude toward Methodism resulted in an expression of his aggression rather than "an even-handed employment of psychoanalytic concepts and of historical methods."

Gay's apologia reaches an eloquent climax in the last eight pages of the text. He believes that psychoanalytic history is a necessary "orientation rather than a specialty," in what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie called "the adventure of a total history." Gay is convinced that the future of

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historical research and writing lies in the direction he is pointing out. "Both history and psychoanalysis are sciences of memory ... and ... thus seem destined to collaborate in fraternal search for the truth about the past."

This book is aimed at the general readership of all working historians. It will be quite useful in undergraduate courses on historiography. It would be a good first book to read as an introduction to the history of the debate about and the attempted application of psychoanalysis in both biography and cultural history. The thirty-five page bibliography is both bibliographical essay and catalogue, adding greatly to the usefulness of the book for professional historians.

This is a successful book. Gay's learning is impressive, and he states his case with conviction and moderation. Historians seem to be growing in the acceptance of psychoanalytic history as one of the standard orientations in the practice of their craft. A total history is probably impossible to achieve. Historians who believe that it is, and who think that they have achieved it, fall into the smugness and arrogance for which Sigmund Freud is so frequently criticized. Still, the adventure of a total history is the reponsibility, the excitement, the joy of their craft. The practitioners of psychoanalysis have proven its value in two generations of clinical application. Psychoanalysis can assist historians in the most essential, and the most difficult, aspect of their inquirythat is, not just what happened, but why it happened.

Charles W. Brockwell, Jr.

University of Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky