SOURCE: Smith, Paul. “Hoping to Hurt.” London Review of Books (9 February 1995): 13.

In the following review, Smith describes The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume III: The Cultivation of Hatred as “an ambitious undertaking,” praising the volume's vast array of primary sources and detailed information.

Peter Gay's The Cultivation of Hatred completes his Freudian psychoanalysis of the bourgeois 19th century by bringing aggression to bear alongside the forces of sexuality which form the subject of the preceding volumes, Education of the Senses and The Tender Passion. That aggression and sexuality are intimately associated, at once intermingled and opposed, Gay has no doubt, pointing to the ‘provocative oxymorons like “sweet cruelty,” the “voluptuousness of revenge” and “cruel tenderness”,’ in which Heine and others registered their sense of the ambiguity of the relationship. For analytical purposes, he has had to separate them in this vast undertaking. The hurt of historians is...