'It occurred to me,' he writes, 'that pain without any lesion must have constituted a major difficulty for nineteenth-century physicians adopting such a praxis' (p. This book makes a valuable, if limited, contribution to the nineteenth-century history of pain - specifically, to what Andrew Hodgkiss calls 'pain without lesion.' He begins by evoking the familiar clinical gaze that transforms prescientific medicine through a focus on localized lesions. Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine. From Lesion to Metaphor: Chronic Pain in British, French and German Medical Writings, 1800-1914. Psychoanalytic and historical themes have been continually intertwined in his essays and books.īulletin of the History of Medicine 76.1 (2002) 165-166Īndrew Hodgkiss. His biography of Freud portrays a thinker deeply indebted to the universal values of Enlightenment, rather than the specific circumstances of fin-de-siécle Vienna. His historical writings consistently return to themes such as sexuality, aggression, repression, and self-understanding (or self-delusion). His 1988 biography of Sigmund Freud, A Life for Our Time, stands out even among his various writings on psychoanalysis.2 Having early on rejected “psychohistory,” Peter developed what he described as a social history of ideas informed by psychoanalytic concepts. His achievements as a historian are well-known, from his early work on the Enlightenment, to his multivolume study of bourgeois culture, to his recent survey of European modernism.1 He has been prolific, and his interests wide-ranging, including years during the 1980s training as a research analyst at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute in New Haven. Peter will need little introduction to readers of this volume.

In the autumn of 2009 I made my way to the New York apartment of Peter Gay, where he and I spent the afternoon talking about psychoanalysis and history.

Freud by Peter Gay