SOURCE: McClay, Wilfred M. “Hymn to Freud.” Commentary 85, no. 3 (March 1988): 77–79.

In the following negative review, McClay describes A Godless Jew as a “hymn to Sigmund Freud.”

As anyone acquainted with his work knows, Peter Gay is an enthusiastic partisan of the Enlightenment. From earliest writings, he has consistently championed the rational disenchantment of the world, and looked to the likes of Voltaire and Diderot, Feuerbach and Marx, and above all, Sigmund Freud, as his ancestral heroes. And there is something to be said for this stance, when it is taken in moderation and modesty, for it can foster a healthy resistance to the fashionable irrationalisms that periodically afflict even advanced minds. As a refugee (albeit a very young one) from the Nazis, Gay has been understandably preoccupied with the dangers that can result from the wanton abandonment of reason. Skepticism, as Santayana once remarked, is the chastity of...