Peter Gay (1923-2015): In Memoriam

In 1955, at age 32, Peter Gay was a successful political scientist. He had become a graduate student at Columbia in 1946, started teaching in the Department of Public Law and Government in 1947, and earned his political science doctorate in 1951. In 1952, his dissertation on German democratic socialist Eduard Bernstein was published to excellent reviews. Surprisingly, in 1955 he was passed over for promotion. Gay was at a crossroads. He told his dilemma to his close friend, Richard Hofstadter, the distinguished Columbia historian. Fortuitously, the university’s history department had an opening in modern European history. Through Hofstadter’s influence, a political scientist became a historian.

This academic experience was not the first crossroads in Gay’s life. Born Peter Joachim Frohlich in Berlin on June 20, 1923, for 16 years he and his family endured being Jewish in Nazi Germany. A life changing occurrence was his family’s ability to escape Germany in 1939. The Frohlichs went to Cuba, then to Denver in 1941. En route, they changed their last name to its English language equivalent, Gay. Peter graduated from the University

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of Denver in 1946, then he was off to Columbia University.

Once he was in the history department, Gay educated himself in the methods and standards of history, querying historian friends as to what he needed to learn. In 1959, he published a book combining political science and history, Voltaire’s Politics, and married. His wife, Ruth Slotkin Glazer, was recently divorced from sociologist Nathan Glazer and had three daughters under the age of ten from her first marriage. Peter and Ruth remained married until her death in 2006. It was a long and productive marriage, and later in life Ruth became a historian herself, publishing books on Jews in Europe.

The publication of his two volumes on the Enlightenment lifted Gay to recognition as a leading historian. The first of them, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism won the National Book Award in 1967. Over the course of his long career he was the recipient of many awards, including the Heineken Prize for History in 1990, the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992, and the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2003.

Earlier, while he was writing his Enlightenment books, something was brewing inside Dr. Gay. He was developing a strong interest in psychoanalysis. This percolation had been going on for a long period. He first became interested in Freud’s ideas in 1950 through two other refugees from Nazi Germany: Franz Neumann and Herbert Marcuse. Neumann had arrived as part of the political science faculty at Columbia while Gay was a graduate student. They became friendly, and through Neumann he met philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Their high regard for Freud convinced Gay he should learn about this controversial innovator. Marcuse in 1955 published his view of the promise of Freud’s work, Eros and Civilization. The first evidence of Freud’s influence on Gay’s work was his 1968 volume, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. One chapter was called “The Revolt of the Sons” and another “The Revenge of the Fathers.” As Gay himself said, “…the Oedipus complex had come to the Weimar Republic” (A Life of Learning, 2004, 7).

The year Gay published his Weimar book, the revolt of the sons was striking close to home. In April of that year, the Columbia University chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Afro-American Society (SAS) took over

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buildings on campus, and occupied them for a week until the police intervened, cleared the buildings, and arrested 700 people. After that, a strike shut down the University for the remainder of the semester. The student revolt divided academic departments. According to historian Robert McCaughey, “So strong were intradepartmental disagreements about the events of spring ‘68 that collegial relations were soured for years. This disagreement influenced the decisions of several faculty to leave Columbia, among them Peter Gay in history” (Stand Columbia, 2003, 464). Gay went to the history department at Yale in 1969, where he later was appointed Sterling Professor of History, and retired from Yale in 1993. Among the activities of his productive retirement was serving as the founding director of the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers (1997-2003).

In Connecticut, Gay’s interest in Freud and psychoanalysis intensified. He studied at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis from 1976 to 1983, and had a traditional psychoanalysis, seeing his analyst five times a week. Gay’s historical work became centered on Freud and psychoanalysis for a number of years. He made substantial efforts to convince historians that they needed psychoanalysis to understand history. Historians, Gay maintained, do not always acknowledge how psychological assumptions permeate their writings. Gay said historians “attribute motives,” study “passions,” and “analyze irrationality.” The historian is “an amateur psychologist” (Freud for Historians, 1985, 6). He wrote that historians assume that individuals are motivated by self-interest; a rough psychology adopted from a rough economic theory is imported into history as if it meets empirical standards. He showed the empirical and theoretical inadequacy of such purported motivations, even within the economic sphere. The supposedly material motivations of historical actors do not stand up to critical psychological examination. While Gay’s analysis was convincing, he acknowledged that “I cannot see any evidence that it has left the slightest mark on my profession” (Gay, A Life of Learning, 2004, 9).

Still, Gay soldiered on. Between 1976 and 1993, he wrote or edited seven books with Freud in the title. The most well-known is his massive single volume biography of Freud called Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988). His five-volume The Bourgeois Experience was psychoanalytically influenced and appeared between 1984 and 1998. Given how much Gay championed Freud, it is not

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surprising that some identified him as a psychohistorian. He resisted this label, and was critical of the field. He said its “defects…compromise much of its work”; “these weaknesses” include “reductionism” and a “cavalier way with evidence” (Freud for Historians, 17). To Gay, “the historical reductionism of psychohistorians, however interesting and even important it can be, cannot by its nature unmask the past in all its dimensions” (A Life of Learning, 11). When asked if he was a psychohistorian, Gay said: “No, I am a historian…I am a historian who uses psychoanalysis” (Elovitz, et al., Clio’s Psyche, Vol. 4, No. 2, Sept. 1997, 63).  

While Gay avoided being grouped with psychohistory, he was writing on Freud in a period of Freud bashing. Frederick Crews’ 1990’s essays in the New York Review of Books attacking Sigmund Freud unleashed a storm of controversy and were succeeded by a number of books debunking Freud. Gay stayed out of these disputes. Though this did not stop Crews from taking potshots at Gay, describing “the perfect vacuum achieved by the historian and Freud apologist Peter Gay” (“Confessions of a Freud Basher”).

While Gay was an ardent defender of Freud, his biography is more balanced and scholarly than those that preceded and succeeded it. Still, it is easy to see Gay’s loyalty to and admiration of Freud, and his underestimation of some of Freud’s liabilities. In March 2009, I witnessed an 85-year-old Peter Gay evaluate a reading of Terry Johnson’s comedy Hysteria, a play about Freud in 1939. The play is not particularly favorable to Freud, and Gay in his comments defended Freud’s efforts. Though by that time Dr. Gay needed a walker to get around, his mind was sharp and his insights evident.

Peter Gay lived for six years after this event at the University of Connecticut, dying on May 12, 2015 at the age of 91. His first book was published in 1952 and his last in 2015. He was a prodigious worker with an extremely wide range of interests. Gay said of himself, “I have at times been accused of being a workaholic. I must plead guilty to the charge that it is undisturbed working time that makes me happy. The traditional division between work and play does not really fully apply to me” (A Life of Learning, 18). His playful work led him to write about Mozart, Voltaire, Freud, modernism, Manet, Gropius, Deism, the romantics, and much more. In describing his own motivation, he wrote, “the single quality that gives my writing a certain coherence, I think, is a passion

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for getting things straight. In short, it is revisionist…to correct what I deem significant misreadings of the past has always been interesting, tempting, and highly enjoyable to me” (A Life of Learning, 13). He wanted accuracy and to correct what others have written; to leave his own mark by revising what his predecessors had done.

Gay was legendary for hosting people at his Hamden, Connecticut home, with his impressive library, art collection, love of tuna sandwiches, and also dining at the Yorkside Pizza Restaurant, near the Yale campus. For psychohistorians, he will be remembered for going against the grain by advocating for a psychoanalytically informed history, and also bucking the trend by showing the stature of the founder of psychoanalysis when Freud bashing was the rage.

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