Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments

By Peter Gay

Book Overview

"As every biographer of Freud must ruefully acknowledge, Freud, that great unriddler of mysteries, left behind some intriguing private mysteries of his own. It was because I hoped to solve some of these mysteries that the stratagem of finding my way to Freud by indirections commended itself to me." -Peter Gay
In this book, the eminent cultural historian and Freud scholar Peter Gay presents a series of essays in which he tries to "reduce the blank spots on the map we now have of Freud's mind." Engaging as well as illuminating, the essays range from reflections on Freud and Shakespeare to Gay's controversial spoof review of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.
The book begins with "Freud and the Man from Stratford," in which Gay describes Freud's fascination with the theory that the Earl of Oxford was the real author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare and speculates on the reasons for Freud's belief. "Six Names in Search of an interpretation" considers Freud's choices of names for his six children and what they revealed about his Jewishness, his love of science, and his ambivalent feelings toward his father. "Freud on Freedom" deals with the issue of determinism and free will in Freud's work. "Reading Freud through Freud's Reading" analyzes ten "good" books Freud identified in response to a questionnaire.
The second half of the book, entitled "Entertainments," includes an essay on "Serious Jests" that cites some vintage Jewish jokes frequently recounted by Freud and points out how these chestnuts illustrate not only psychoanalytic concepts but the anti-Semitism that permeated Freud's Vienna; the "review" of The Interpretation of Dreams, published in Harper's in 1981; "A Gentile Science?" which is a "report" on the work of one Sigmund Oberhufer, a fictitious Austrian doctor said to have "invented" psychoanalysis; and "The Dog That Did Not Bark in the Night," Gay's account of the newly accessible correspondence between Freud and his sister-in-law Minna Bernays, who some writers claim was his lover. The essays, some of them published for the first time or expanded from their original versions, are accompanied by informative introductions.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300051271
• ISBN13: 9780300051278
• Release Date: July 1991
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Peter Gay is a Delight

This book is a frolic in the Freudian pasture. The previous (and sole review) is by virtue of the evidence within itself, misleading and erroneous. Check out Gay's own biography(he's German and "Gay" is not his original name) and it all becomes a lot clearer. (Freud is much more an open read to the German reader than anyone else - highfalutin' neoclassical terms like "Ego" come from the mere German "das Ich", and the mysterious Id" is simply "das Es" - so clear and immediately grasped in the original German!) The other other reviewer writes of Freud's ideas: "Yes, they're a hundred+ years out of date at this time . . . " With all due respect - that is poppycock! So Darwin is 150 years "out of date" and Newton and Plato - well, let's look at the newer models ONLY and ignore them as they are long beyond their "expiration date"!!! Read this book for pleasure, for the gifted writing of Peter Gay, who delightfully expounds the genius and unbounded curiosity of Freud.

Definitely some good information here

If you care what happened to Freud, this book is historically relevant and will fill in some personal details. It reads quickly and well. I read it in tandem with a book on F's relationship with Gustav Mahler, also a trip. I never finished Peter Gay's Life of Freud Freud: A Life for Our Time but I believe that was the unvarnished truth, or at least as much as we knew in the nineteen-eighties. In it, Freud did not come of anywhere near as likable as he does in his writings. Now I am wondering if that portrait was un-necessarily harsh. I would like to like Freud: Though some of his ideas do not work for me, I feel others have been seminal in the development of psychiatry and psychology. I think therapists should have some acquaintance with him and Carl Jung. Yes, they're a hundred+ years out of date at this time, but what we don't know about them can come back to haunt us. Nevertheless, who am I to judge(haven't even been to India)?