Peter Gay

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Peter Gay (June 20, 1923-), a Jewish American historian of the social history of ideas, born in Berlin as Peter Joachim Fröhlich . After witnessing Kristallnacht (better: Pogromnacht) in 1938, he fled Nazi Germany in 1939. His family initially booked passage on the SS St. Louis (whose passengers were eventually denied visas) but fortuitously changed their booking to an earlier voyage to the U.S. He came to the United States in 1941 and took American citizenship in 1946. Gay received his education at the University of Denver, where he was awarded a BA in 1946 and at Columbia University where he was awarded an MA in 1947 and PhD in 1951. Gay worked as political science professor at Columbia between 1948-1955 and as history professor from 1955-1969. He taught at Yale from 1969 until his retirement in 1993. He married Ruth Slotkin (d. 2006) in 1959 and has adopted three step-children.

Gay's first interest was in intellectual history. His 1959 book, Voltaire's Politics examined Voltaire as a politician and the how his politics influenced the ideas that Voltaire championed in his writings. Gay followed the success of Voltaire's Politics with a wider history of the Enlightenment, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1969), for which he was honored with a National Book prize and the Mecher Book prize. Gay's 1968 book, Weimar Culture was considered at the time to be a ground-breaking cultural history of the Weimar Republic. Starting in 1978 with Freud, Jews and Other Germans, an examination of the impact of Freudian ideas on German culture, Gay has become increasingly interested in psychology. Many of his works focus on the social impact of psychoanalysis. Gay is a leading champion of Psychohistory, and is a follower of Sigmund Freud.

Gay was educated at the Goethe-Gymnasium in Berlin. He taught at Columbia University and at Yale University. He is Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University (retired 1993).

[edit] Awards

• AHA Award for Scholarly Distinction.
• Jewish Distinction Award
• Civil Rights Awareness Award (Presented by the NAACP)

[edit] Works

• The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx, 1952.
• Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist, 1959.
• The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment, 1964.
• The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism, 1966.
• The Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America, 1966.
• Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, 1968.
• The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Science of Freedom, 1969.
• The Bridge of Criticism: Dialogues on the Enlightenment, 1970.
• Historians at Work, 1972.
• co-written with R.K. Webb, Modern Europe, 1973.
• The Enlightenment; A Comprehensive Anthology, 1973.
• Style in History, 1974.
• Art and Act: On Causes in History—Manet, Gropius, Mondrian, 1976.
• Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture, 1978.
• Education of the Senses, 1984.
• The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud - 5 vols, 1984-1998 (includes The Education of the Senses and The Cultivation of Hatred)
• Freud for Historians, 1985.
• The Tender Passion, 1986.

• A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis, 1987.
• Freud: A Life for Our Time, 1988.
• "The German-Jewish Legacy-and I: Some Personal Reflections" pages 203-210 from American Jewish Archives, Volume 40, 1988.
• Editor A Freud Reader, 1989.
• Reading Freud: Explorations & Entertainments, 1990.
• Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities, 1993.
• The Cultivation of Hatred, 1993.
• The Naked Heart, 1995.
• The Enlightenment and the Rise of Modern Paganism revised edition, 1995.
• Pleasure Wars, 1998.
• My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin, 1998 (autobiography).
• Mozart, 1999.
• Schnitzler's Century, 2002.

[edit] Reference

• Toews, John "Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud in His Time and of Our Time" pages 504-545 from Journal of Modern History, Volume 63, 1991.