Volume 35, Number 13 · August 18, 1988
Oedipus at Berggasse 19
By William J. McGrath
Freud: A Life for Our Time
by Peter Gay
Norton, 810 pp., $25.00
A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis
by Peter Gay
Yale University Press, 182 pp., $17.95
On the title page of Peter Gay's Freud is a drawing of Oedipus contemplating the riddle of the Sphinx, an appropriate emblem for the biography of a man bent on understanding life's great enigmas. Gay sees this characteristic as a unifying thread in Freud's life: 'The only thing that gave him peace when he was in the grip of a riddle was to find its solution.' He emphasizes, as did Ernest Jones, the importance of Freud's own puzzling family constellation, with half brothers the age of his mother and a nephew who was a year older than himself. 'Such childhood conundrums left deposits that Freud repressed for years and would only recapture through dreams and laborious self-analysis.'
Review, 5299 words
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