ABSTRACT
Peter Gay seems oversocialized to psychoanalysis, and so there is a conformist ring to his explications of the Freudian model of personality development. Psychoanalysis does focus on the presence of inner conflicts, and one wishes there were more signs in Gay of ambivalence, if not dissent from orthodoxy. When Gay tells us that his reception at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and at the American Psychoanalytic Association was “unfailingly cordial and never condescending,” one might never guess at how horrible the fanaticism of an aroused orthodoxy can be. Methodology about psychohistory, no matter how sophisticated Stannard, Gay, and William McKinley Runyanmight be, can in the end only take us so far. Also distressing is Gay’s inability to distinguish between psychoanalysis as an intellectual entity and as a trade union. Even in 1939 Hanns Sachs, one of Sigmund Freud’s loyal disciples, wrote about how the scientific movement and the organization had drifted apart.
