SOURCE: Kennedy, Eugene. “Sigmund Freud: Was He Enlightenment Incarnate or an Artist of the Trompe L'Oeil?” Chicago Tribune Books (10 April 1988): 1, 5, 9.

In the following review of Freud: A Life for Our Time, Kennedy praises Gay's biography in its application of Freudian analysis to Freud himself, but criticizes Gay for attempting to defend Freudian theory against all of its detractors.

The distinguished cultural historian Peter Gay begins this remarkable biography of Sigmund Freud [Freud: A Life for Our Time] with a quotation that captures well the mood and spirit of the entire work. The words are those of Freud himself about Leonardo da Vinci: “There is no one so great that it would be a disgrace for him to be subject to the laws did govern normal and pathological activity with equal severity.”

If the Viennese founder of psychoanalysis came to this humane but knowing judgment about a towering figure...