SOURCE: Taylor, Eugene. “Dr. Freud or Dr. Fraud?” Commonweal, no. 11 (1 June 1991): 379–80.

In the following review of Reading Freud, Taylor praises Gay's volume of essays for its fine scholarship and skillful prose.

Why more Freud? After all, Professor Gay has already brought us five different works either about or including the Inventor of Psychoanalysis, and then topped that with his award winning biography Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), which he followed with an anthology of readings. By his own direct statement, and by reading between the lines, the author of this little text [Reading Freud] gives us three reasons for yet an additional dose of the Psychoanalytic Wizard of Vienna. The first is for the love of fine scholarship as an end in itself. The second is to put a few finishing touches on the study of a life the way lives have been classically studied. The third...