What is the author's tone in The Freud Reader by Sigmund Freud?

The tone of the work is educative. The editor Peter Gay has provided supplemental details for the benefit of the reader. These notes give information about when the paper originally came out, and often provide context for it within the overall career of Sigmund Freud. The notes also add a bit of cultural and historical perspective to the situation. This is quite helpful, since Freud's work began in the nineteenth century and worked its way through both of the two so-called World Wars of the first half of the twentieth century.