SOURCE: Pomper, Philip. Review of Freud for Historians, by Peter Gay. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 1 (summer 1987): 150–52.

In the following negative review of Freud for Historians, Pomper asserts that Gay's work “lacks either a compelling thesis or a novel approach.”

Gay's book [Freud for Historians] serves several purposes. In it he completes his trilogy of works on the historian's craft; continues the interminable struggle against detractors of Freud, psychoanalysis, and psychohistory; and shows how psychoanalysis augments several areas of historical inquiry. Gay's central concern is to bring to the forefront an important social psychology implicit in Freud's work and, with the aid of history, to work toward a psychohistorical theory of culture. To put it another way, Gay aims to elaborate Freud's own program of wedding psychoanalysis to anthropology, sociology, and history, a program already adumbrated in Totem and Taboo and affirmed in Freud's autobiography. In sum, this...