ABSTRACT
To ask the question whether Freud was a nice guy is to elicit several different types of answers. To start off with a response in the form of another question: why on earth should we expect, or want, anybody born as long ago as 1856 to match standards that are anything like our own? One essential job of a historian should be to enable people to go back to an era unlike that in which we live today. We should proceed on the premise that the past is necessarily relevant to contemporary life, without at the same time steam-rolling all the differences between then and now. It would be essentially anachronistic to expect anybody from history to fulfill our own expectations about what we might approve of in our own time. And yet it is somehow typical of recent trends to be present-minded and unhistorical, stripping the past of what makes it most distinctive, compelling, interesting, and instructive.
