ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud continues to attract biographical interest. But the subtitle to Peter Gay’s biography 1 (“A Life For Our Time”) betrays its central flaw. For despite his being a historian, Gay has committed a central sin of the profession —presentism. Gay has written as if Freud, although he was a European born in 1856, were somehow our contemporary; and therefore Gay has flattened out or ignored the central differences between the genuine Freud and ourselves. He has missed the chance to hold up the example of the real Freud, who was inevitably a man of his time, hard though it may be to reconstruct. Gay has neglected to present a vision of how life might be lived differently from our own conventions.
