Contemporary Literary Criticism | Gay, Peter - Benjamin Goodnick (essay date winter 1989)

Benjamin Goodnick (essay date winter 1989)

SOURCE: Goodnick, Benjamin. “Two Jews—Freud and Gay.” Judaism 38, no. 1 (winter 1989): 103–11.

[In the following essay, Goodnick discusses the works of Gay and Sigmund Freud in relation to Jewish identity.]

Sigmund Freud continues to be a spring of living waters where writers still quench their psychological thirst and fructify their intellectual fields. Whether because of the fascinating features of his history and personality, the vast impact of his creativity on our culture, the hidden depth to which he has exposed and touched our individual, sensitive psyches, or the novel applications of his hypotheses, any new Freudian work excites our interest.

In recent days Freud has been the major stimulus for psycho-historians to apply the clarifying light of psychoanalysis to the lives of nations and their leaders. Foremost among these is Dr. Peter Gay, who has maintained his jet-pace...

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