Freud for historians

273 Pages·1986·11.946 MB·English

by  Gay, Peter

FREUD FOR HISTORIANS
Books by Peter Gay
The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, volume I,
Education of the Senses (1984)
Freud, Jews and Other Germans:
Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (1978)
Art and Act: On Causes in History—Manet,
Gropius, Mondrian (1976)
Style in History (1974)
Modem Europe (1973), with R. K. Webb
The Bridge of Criticism: Dialogues on the Enlightenment (1970)
The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, volume II,
The Science of Freedom (1969)
Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968)
A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (1966)
The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, volume I,
The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966)
The Party of Humanity: Essays in the
French Enlightenment (1964)
Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist (1959)
The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism:
Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (1952)
F R E UD
FOR HISTORIANS
Peter Gay
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Melbourne Auckland
and associated companies in
Beirut Berlin Ibadan Nicosia
Copyright © 1985 by Peter Gay
First published in 1985 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1986
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Gay, Peter, 1923-
Freud for historians.
Includes index.
1. Psychohistory. I. Title.
D16.16.G39 1985 901'.9 85-10665
ISBN 0-19-503586-0
ISBN 0-19-504228-X (pbk.)
Printing (last digit): 987654
Printed in the United States of America
To
ERNST PRELINGER
and to one other
for talking, and for listening
Acts and examples stay
WILLIAM JAMES
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Preface
This book is the concluding volume of a trilogy I did not
intend to write. When, in 1974,1 published Style in History,
I thought I had paid my tribute to historiography. In that
expedition of discovery among the stylistic devices of four
master rhetoricians—Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay, and Burck-
hardt—I attempted to locate history among the human sci-
ences. My conclusion, less banal, I trust, in the extended
argument than in bald summary, was that, for history, the
old sharp division between art and science is untenable: in
ways I attempted to demonstrate in the book, it is both.
Although there is at first glance nothing very startling
about such a judgment, my particular formulation raised
questions about the fundamental intentions of my craft that
Style in History could not address, let alone resolve. The
historian's art, I proposed, forms part of his science; his
manner is neither decoration nor idiosyncrasy but is inextric-
ably bound up with his matter. Style, in short, helps to bear
the burden, and define the nature, of substance. This quite
naturally propelled me from the way that the historian ex-
presses himself to the issues he is bound to find most critical.
"In the course of his work," I wrote two years later, "the
historian does many things, but his most difficult and, I
think most interesting, assignment is to explain the causes
of historical events." I found that to think about cause is to
viii Preface
enter an uninterrupted professional debate in which his-
torians engage with great gusto, and in which the stakes are
the highest possible. And it is to encounter the insistent
claims of psychology on the historian's attention.
Like Style in History, its sequel about causation, Art and
Act, was steeped in concrete experience: in the company of
most historians, I have always been most comfortable
among specific instances. While, in the earlier book, I con-
structed my case by examining the work of four great his-
torians, in its successor, I focused on three influential
artists—Manet, Gropius, and Mondrian—to urge a pluralis-
tic but confident stance toward historical causation. In an
introductory chapter I spelled out the theory informing
these exercises in cultural biography, and diagrammed the
relations among three clusters of causes, those springing
from the private domain, from craft, and from culture. It is
in their subtle interplay, their jostling for supremacy, that
psychology asserts its special rights.
The intellectual kinship of these two books lies on the
surface. Both are explorations in historical epistemology;
both, while arguing for the overpowering variety of possible
ways of expressing historical truths and of reaching them,
are relatively optimistic about the historian's reach and
grasp. It is curious: when historians settle down to reflect
about their business—a self-conscious, not always felicitous
venture into philosophical rumination they are often se-
duced to undertake after they have reached the age of fifty—
they are apt to profess themselves pronounced subjectivists.
They will likely insist that every historian's personal demons
or social aspirations dictate a severely limiting perspective
on the past, and that no amount of self-awareness will ever
let him escape these inescapable pressures for partisanship.
The historian's style, on that view, is a repository of biases
Preface ix
and his perception of causes is bound to be compromised by
the same crippling ideological burdens. In dissent, I argued
that style can also be a privileged passage to historical
knowledge and that the historian's particular vision of what
made the past world move, however distorted that vision
may be by his neuroses, professional deformations, or class
prejudices, may yet assist him in securing insights into his
material that he could not have gained without them. Gib-
bon's stately irony, for one, a kind of magnificent nastiness
that pervaded his character, was the perfect instrument for
dissecting the dominant political motives of Imperial Rome,
with its high professions and low motives; Burckhardt's re-
pressed bachelor existence, for another, gave rise to luxu-
riant fantasies of cruelty and power supremely adapted to
appreciating the mentality of the outsize condottieri con-
ducting the wars of the Italian Renaissance. I had no taste
for joining the camp of historians who judge attainment of
reliable knowledge about causes a chimera, or those who
reduce the glittering, multicolored costume of historical ex-
perience to the drab uniform of a single dominant set of
impulsions. The two books were at once a warning against
the facile pessimism of the skeptics and the equally facile
simplifications of the dogmatists.
My plea for history as an elegant, fairly rigorous aesthetic
science was, as I have already hinted, powerfully assisted
by my commitment to psychology, in particular to psycho-
analysis.1 I saw it then, and see it even more now, as a re-
I. I should emphatically make plain from the outset that by "psy-
choanalysis" I mean more than the body of work done by Sigmund
Freud and his immediate disciples alone. I include that of their suc-
cessors who, though in some respects going their own way and at-
tending to clinical experiences not available to Freud, securely belong
into his camp. I stress this here because the title of my book, and the