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An Interview With Peter Gay
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19295 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
5,340 Words |
| Author
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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Although many readers today know Prof. Peter Gay primarily through his writings on Sigmund Freud, including the acclaimed biography Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), Gay's other works encompass a wide range of subjects--politics (The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, 1952), the Enlightenment (Voltaire's Politics, 1959 and The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 1966-69), art history (Art and Act: On Cause in History, 1976), and nineteenth-century studies (the ongoing series of books collectively titled, The Bourgeois Experience, begun in 1984). In each of these books he strives to explore within social and private contexts the genesis of social thought.
He was born in Berlin in 1923, emigrated with his family to Cuba in 1939, and came to the United States in 1941. He earned degrees from the University of Denver and Columbia University in political science and history; and in psychoanalysis from the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is currently Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. His conversation--like his books--may dwell one moment on composer Johannes Brahms, another on mid-nineteenth-century railway timetables, the social consequences of the postage stamp, female characters in David Copperfield, or the sex researches of Krafft-Ebing.
At age fifty in the mid-1970s he began a seven-year long training in psychoanalysis to prepare himself for his Bourgeois Experience series and his works on Freud. Psychoanalysis, says Gay, has been an important tool for his historical research. He writes in Freud for Historians:
The professional historian has always been a psychologist--an amateur psychologist. [He] constructs his work on the tacit conviction that human beings display certain stable and discernible traits. ... He discovers causes and his discovery normally includes acts of the mid.... Among all his auxiliary sciences, psychology is the historian's unacknowledged principal aide.
Thus, whether his subject is the history of an idea, a famous person (like Freud), or an ordinary middle-class citizen, Gay seeks out primary materials--letters, diaries, medical reports, private archives--to reveal how social thought has its origins in the public and private lives of individuals.
Freud remains one of Gay's most absorbing interests. Freud has figured prominently in many of his books, including Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (1978), The Bourgeois Experience series
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