Freud

Best compendium of Freud's work by far. And with intelligent commentary by Gay. Yes, some of Siggy's turgid prose is hard going but, it is worth the investment in time and effort. Read it with an open mind and you will see how timeless Freud's message is...and Gay does not sink into sycophancy, as many others did.

If you have minimal knowledge about the father of psychoanlaysis, or if you hold strong opinions about the "Prof" as his students and colleagues referred to him deferentially and affectionally, this work by Peter Gay will highlight the peaks of Freud's dazzling insights, and provide plenty of background for his all too human failings. Freud is presented as a man struggling with issues of family, career, and the inevitablity of death. Gay is able to condense and summarize key Freudian concepts and place them in the context of the life and cultural time of the father of psychoanalysis. For students of psychology as well as observers of our current cultural and political delusions, Gay neatly captures the details as well as the broad scope of Freud's shadow on the 20th Century and beyond.

Disagree with two of the reviewers below: Gay is not unbearly biased in favor of Freud, book is not too much for casual dabblers in the subject. First, one could hardly expect a six hundred page biography of Freud to be authored by someone who hates the man. Important to be realistic about who writes books in the first place. Second, Freud was a prolific writer, and the book doesn't shy away from in depth analysis, so really it's like two three hundred page books. Now, if that's too much Freud for you, you're probably not that interested in the first place. I like to read biographies of thinkers who left behind copious amount of published work. That way, it's easier to get a sense of what you want to read (if anything) by the author. Because much of Freud's work revolves around family life, his family life is more then usually interesting. It's impossible to appreciate the originality of Freud's thought without having a firm context for HIS everyday life. This book provides a balanced reading of Freud's controverial life. I found the bad to be included as much as the good. Freud's influence on the 20th century has been so profound that even if you completely disagree with the man (over, say, his attitude towards women), it is still rewarding to learn about his thought.

Peter Gay has given us yet another intelligent and stimulating work. The book was highly praised in a review and although I would have never thought it possible, the writing transported one back to the Europe of the early 20th century. In many aspects Freud was a typical bourgeois Jew - intellectual, deeply opinionated, haughty, wealthy, well-mannered and hard-working.His group-breaking advances are explained in detail as well as his ideas on several modern practices he patented - therapy, the id, ego and superego, guilt, eroticism. It was the latter on which he rested his claim for in his exploration of sexuality he thinks he has discovered the core of each of us. We are, he states, sexual creatures and all our decisions and thought processes are geared around that fact. The triune history - Freud's, psychotherapy, Europe - combine to form a dazzling work in which the author shows a real empathy for his subject. One of the best around.

Freud's psychology is a complex web that Gay untangles as well as Freud could have himself. There are diferent Freuds, conventional and controversial. Sometimes in honest scientific research, sometimes involved in power games and his enormous egotism.Freud only became famous after the age of fifty, and the build up to this is as interesting as what happens afterwards. All his important writings are discussed, from the seminal 'Interpretation of Dreams' to his bizarre final work, 'Moses and Monotheism'Gay says that he wrote the book 'neither to denounce nor to flatter but to understand'. If you are prepared to give a lot of energy (the book is 700 pages of dense material) to reading the biography, you will be rewarded with a brilliantly detailed portrait of Freud.