Peter Gay, a popular and prize-winning historian who meticulously traced the rise of secular Western thought, from a prize-winning history of the Enlightenment to a best-selling biography of Sigmund Freud, has died.
Gay died yesterday at his home in Manhattan, his stepdaughter Elizabeth Glazer told The Associated Press. He was 91 and died of "old age," Glazer said.
The German-born Gay wrote more than 25 books, including a five-part series on the 19th century bourgeois and two volumes on the Enlightenment. He also wrote about Mozart, 19th century fiction, 20th century cinema, and, in his highly regarded "Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider," about art and intellectual life in Germany before Hitler's rise.
Western Europe was the setting for much of his work and Freud was Gay's recurring subject. An urbane and non-believing Jew, like Freud, Gay found in him not only a compelling life and body of work, but an approach to history.
Gay studied psychoanalytic training at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and he advocated Freudian techniques for historical scholarship, rejecting fears that the field would be reduced to formulas about childhood desires and neuroses.
"Freud was not a historian, but he knew that men's minds, even their unconscious minds, change across time and differ across class," Gay once wrote. "Concern for individuality, that mark of the historian, pervades all of Freud's writings."
Gay wrote several works on Freud and summed up his findings in the best-selling "Freud: A Life For Our Time." Freud's integrity had been questioned and his theories challenged, but Gay praised his "long and unrivaled career as the archaeologist of the mind.
