Freud: A Life for Our Time

Summary

Gay writes that, "As a historian, I have placed Freud and his work within their various environments: the psychiatric profession he subverted and revolutionized, the Austrian culture in which he was compelled to life as an unbelieving Jew and unconventional physician, the European society that underwent in his lifetime the appalling traumas of war and totalitarian dictatorship, and Western culture as a whole, a culture whose sense of itself he transformed out of all recognition, forever."

Gay criticizes Freud for sentimentalizing the emotional tie between a mother and her son, writing that Freud's observation that the relation of mother to son is the only lasting intimate relationship that does not conceal a sediment of hostile feelings, "sounds far more like a wish than a sober inference from clinical material." At the end of the book, Gay provides a bibliographical essay evaluating works dealing with Freud and psychoanalysis. He describes Elizabeth M. Thornton's The Freudian Fallacy (1983) as "a model in the literature of denigration". He credits philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, in The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984), with discrediting Karl Popper's argument that psychoanalysis is a pseudo-science.

Positive

A best-selling book, Freud: A Life for Our Time has been widely translated. Philosophers Jerome Neu and Richard Wollheim praised the work and compared it to Jones's The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953). Wollheim observed that while Gay, unlike Jones, did not suffer from the limitation of being able to write only what Anna Freud found acceptable, his freedom as a scholar was nevertheless restricted by the policies of the Freud Archives. Wollheim wrote that Gay tries to integrate Freud's life and thought, including only as much of Freud's thought as necessary to understand his life. Wollheim credited Gay with excellent insight into the events of Freud's time. Christopher Badcock, writing in 1992, called the work the best up-to-date biography of Freud. Richard H. Armstrong credits Gay with "extraordinary narrative skills".

Negative

Freud: A Life for Our Time was criticized by several authors skeptical of psychoanalysis. Author Allen Esterson identified Gay as one of several authors who uncritically repeat Freud's incorrect claim that during his early clinical experiences, which led to the creation of psychoanalysis, his patients reported to him that they had been sexually abused in early childhood, and he subsequently realized that in most cases these assaults were phantasies, not real events.

Author Richard Webster, writing in Why Freud Was Wrong (1995), argued that while Gay presents Freud: A Life for Our Time as an objective exercise in historical scholarship, and considers the failings of psychoanalysis and Freud's mistakes, he retains a reverent attitude toward Freud, preserving the myths about him created by previous biographers. Webster called these myths the "Freud legend". Webster maintained that the acclaim Gay's book received shows the persistence of the Freud legend, noting that with exceptions such as Peter Swales, many reviewers praised it, especially in Britain. He saw its appeal to supporters of psychoanalysis as being its favorable view of Freudian ideas.

Psychologist Louis Breger called Freud: A Life for Our Time the best known modern biography of Freud, but wrote that despite Gay's claims, the book is neither fair nor objective. Breger described Gay as being as "worshipful" of Freud as Jones, and accused him of not only portraying Freud as being on the right side of all controversies, but of portraying those on the other side, such as Josef Breuer, Wilhelm Stekel, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Sándor Ferenczi, as "cowards, petty, or mentally disturbed."

Philosopher Todd Dufresne wrote that Gay has a "reverential" attitude to psychoanalysis, noting that critics have objected that it reports as fact claims that have long been known to be mistaken, including details concerning the treatment of Freud's patient Anna O.