SOURCE: Storr, Anthony. “Shrinking the Past.” Spectator 256, no. 8226 (8 March 1986): 30–31.

In the following review of Freud for Historians, Storr observes that Gay appears to be a “Freudian fundamentalist” who defends Freudian theory against all criticism.

Peter Gay is Sterling Professor of History at Yale; author of Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, and other books on 19th-century history and culture which are both erudite and elegantly written. He is also a dedicated Freudian, who is convinced that psychoanalytic interpretation can fruitfully be applied, not only to the understanding of historical figures, but also to group behaviour and cultural change.

So-called ‘psychohistory’ has had a bad press. Freud himself was rightly criticised by art historians for basing his interpretation of a fantasy memory of Leonardo's upon a mistranslation; and it is generally recognised that the psychoanalytic biography of Woodrow Wilson in which Freud collaborated with William Bullitt is a disaster. Since...