Freud: A Life for Our Time Book

Peter Gay's biography of Sigmund Freud--Freud: A Life for Our Time--is a deeply researched and far-reaching examination of one of the most provocative and influential thinkers of the modern era. Gay weaves three strands together with great skill: Freud the man, husband, father and friend; Freud the intellectual originator of a comprehensive theory of how the human mind works (including its component forces); and Freud the leader of a professional movement, psychoanalysis, as its preeminent practitioner and indefatigable defender of central psychoanalytic principles and practices.

Freud the man comes across as a fascinating composite of passions, quirks, loyalties, and, in the main, strengths. He wasn't born to wealth, certainly not to privilege, and made his way into medicine despite the antisemitic counterforces of the day, which were substantial. He was widely read, loved Shakespeare and Goethe and of course, Sophocles. He kept up an extensive correspondence that--like his published writing--reflects a powerful mind at ease in the fields of thought. His was highly dependent on one daughter, Anna, herself a psychoanalyst, and crushed when on of his brood died an early death (this happened more than once). He stayed married, happily enough, for sixty years. He had great friends among both men and women. He worked very, very hard. He spent a long time yearning for but gaining no recognition for his insights, and yet that didn't deter him from pursuing his ideas.

Freud the intellectual, who considered himself primarily a scientist, is given substantial, detailed treatment in this book. Gay points out strengths and weaknesses, both as they were apparent right away or became apparent over time, in his theories. Overall, of course, Gay is sympathetic to what we today would call Freudianism, but specifically as it emerged when it emerged, viewed historically, not propagandistically.

Freud the analyst and promoter of psychoanalysis is presented as tough minded, realistic, not always successful in keeping order in the house, and a person who from time to time anointed the wrong successor, notably Carl Jung. The Freud-Jung falling out is well told here; in this case, Jung gets the worst of it.

Gay enriches his text with good historical sketches, i.e., life in Vienna in the 1890s, WWI, the dreadful decade of the Twenties in Austria (and Germany), the rise of Nazism, and antisemitism throughout.

Understandably, if for some reason you hold Freud's work in contempt, you won't enjoy this book, but if you are neutral toward it or somewhat positive toward its monumental novelty (the unconscious. the dynamics of dreams, the revelations to be found in everyday life and jokes, the importance of earliest life experiences, the tensions between love and hate...one could go on), this is an absorbing, well-written and complete biography by a scholar in full control of his powerful, brilliant and endlessly creative subject.