Freud for Historians (Oxford Paperbacks)

Rating:
Summary: A clever book
Review: This study is of major importance in psychohistory. With an elegant style and in very clever and intelligible words, Gay is summarizing a century of psychology since Freud, and its influence on history-writing. Though this study is a summary, this book never loses his wit and ridicule, and because this book carries a thesis (you can use psychology when you're an historian), which is already suggested in the title, 'Freud for Historians' is written in a defensive and coherent style, which is pleasant to read. Because much of all this is still in debate, this book is sure worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: For historians more than really radical thinkers
Review: While FREUD FOR HISTORIANS by Peter Gay is primarily about historians and the interplay between professors in that field and psychoanalysis, my own interest in maintaining a polymorphously perverse view of my own history, including the intellectual interactions inspired by Nietzsche, Freud, and Walter Kaufmann, who had written a trilogy including books on Goethe, Nietzsche, and Freud at the time of his death in 1980 in a quest to apotheosize a few worthy thinkers, leads me to attempt to examine the six major arguments presented in FREUD FOR HISTORIANS (1985) as applying to my own fractured self. Nietzsche wrote like an author who was not as concerned about saying anything soothing to those who read to relax, as he chose instead to illustrate the danger of saying too much. Walter Kaufmann had been born in Germany in 1921 but aptly came to the United States and served in military intelligence during World War II, then translated many of Nietzsche's works and the poetic drama Faust (1961) by Goethe into English as a professor of philosophy in a country that was so un-German, it had hardly been paying attention.

Chapter One of FREUD FOR HISTORIANS is called Secret Needs of the Heart, and the strangest secret need which Nietzsche confessed was for music. Plato as anti-poet philosopher started a long line of professors who would consider popular songs a reflection of the most trivial ideas of their time, but few professors openly considered the possible emotional impact of rock 'n' roll in wartime. I myself felt like the American alter ego of Walter Kaufmann on that subject, eager to guess what his twenty favorite songs might be if he ever heard them. Freud might have liked more of those songs than Walter Kaufmann did, and the jokes which Freud discussed in `Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious' (S.E., VIII, 9n is quoted by Gay on p. 59) were no less ironic than lines in some great popular songs, once the ice on that subject had been shattered and plunged through. Peter Gay writes about "the guilt feelings of parricide" (p. 12) and answers sought "in politics, in day-to-day events." (p. 13). Professors who do not write about anything this weird are unlikely to confess that they have a lot to learn.

Chapter 2, The Claims of Freud, considers terms Freud used to illustrate mental aberrations, "regression and repression, projection and denial, ambivalence and transference and the rest of his professional vocabulary, as precise descriptions of very real mental acts." (p. 43). People who consider history the result of the interaction of grandiose fantasies, no matter what position intellectuals choose to expound or condemn, even if those who act in historical roles have a "growing suspicion that Freudians are not better than religious fanatics, a tribe of true believers" (pp. 43-44), will have little trouble agreeing with Nietzsche's explanation of How the True World Finally Became a Fable (THE PORTABLE NIETZSCHE, pp. 485-486). Gay explains Karl Popper's objections to Freud's theories. "Psychoanalysis, in short, violated the fundamental scientific principle of falsifiability." (p. 63). But Gay finds a standard in "the measure of the patient's motives, thoughts, and actions." (p. 73). Walter Kaufmann even seemed vulnerable because of the nature of the country that he came from, Germany, and where he ended up, in the United States. I also have ancestors from Germany, but a stronger association was with religion, which took in a large number of the motives and thoughts that seemed important to Walter Kaufmann. Falsifiability might have a different meaning if the true world consisted of attitudes that were capable of being evaluated as traps that might be set to catch young people to their own disadvantage. This is taking history a step further than an ordinary professor would push it.

Chapter 3, Human Nature in History, seeks to escape "quintessentially Viennese" (p. 79) considerations. Intellectual freedom always needs a "platform for a new departure in an old discipline. It was a necessary act of intellectual parricide," (p. 83) which might be a harsh definition of my relationship with Walter Kaufmann, at least since he checked the line on the postcard he returned to me in June or July, 1980, that said, "Give it your best shot." Gay includes some lines by Mephistopheles from `Faust' with a prose translation on pages 86-87 complaining that in traveling `Von Harz bis Hellas immer Vettern!' he has found "nothing but cousins." Readers can see what all makes "a family of desire. Historicists were inclined to make light of such fundamental resemblances." (p. 87). Speak of the devil!

Chapter 4, Reason, Reality, Psychoanalysis and the Historian, quickly redefines reality to include fantasies and delusions that are acted on. In Freud's world, "Worse than being merely unattractive, this reality is a Walpurgisnacht, gloomy, obscene, and mendacious, where nothing is what it appears to be." (p. 124). I should apologize for thinking about Walter Kaufmann every time I read something about German thought, because I always seem to be making it sound worse than he would want to admit, and I was trying to be more American than German to him. What was worse than German was my polymorphously perverse refusal to consider growing up a solution. Even for Peter Gay, an analyst "is aware that external reality, more and more of it, lies along the path of maturation." (p. 126). Everything depends on progress. "As its motor skills and mental capacities develop, the child steps, in Freud's terse formulation, from the pleasure principle to the reality principle." (p. 130). Except in a comic society, where entertainment values rule, as Gay does not say.

Chapter 5, From Couch to Culture, might be about intimacy, affective impulses, and Freud concluding that unsatisfied wishes might create "the idea of a cultural superego." (p. 145).

Chapter 6, The Program in Practice, considers "Freud's essay on Leonardo da Vinci." (p. 182). Erik Erikson's pace-setting psychobiography of Luther" (p. 183). You can check the index for the rest.