SOURCE: McGrath, William J. “Oedipus at Berggasse 19.” New York Review of Books 35, no. 13 (18 August 1988): 25–29.

In the following review of Freud: A Life for Our Time and A Godless Jew, McGrath argues that Gay's works on Freud expand our understanding of Freud's life, but fail to address criticism of Freudian theory or to adequately discuss the historical context in which Freud worked and lived.

1.

On the title page of Peter Gay's Freud is a drawing of Oedipus contemplating the riddle of the Sphinx, an appropriate emblem for the biography of a man bent on understanding life's great enigmas. Gay sees this characteristic as a unifying thread in Freud's life: “The only thing that gave him peace when he was in the grip of a riddle was to find its solution.” He emphasizes, as did Ernest Jones, the importance of Freud's own puzzling family constellation, with half brothers the age...