Peter Gay

Peter Gay, registered at birth with the name Peter Joachim Fröhlich (Berlin, June 20, 1923 - New York, May 12, 2015), was a German historian of Jewish origin, naturalized as an American citizen in 1946. He was one of the most important cultivators of the social history of ideas.

Biographical data

He and his family escaped from Nazi Germany in 1939, after witnessing Kristallnacht. The family initially purchased tickets on the SS St. Louis (whose passengers were denied visas), but fortunately they changed their ticket for a trip that departed earlier to the United States, a country where they arrived in 1941 and whose citizenship they applied for for five years. after. He changed his original surname, Fröhlich ('joyful', in German), to the English equivalent, Gay.

Gay studied at the Goethe Gymnasium in Berlin, and then, in the United States, at the University of Denver, where he received a bachelor's degree in arts in 1946. He later studied for a master's degree and a doctorate at Columbia University, and obtained those degrees in 1947 and 1951, respectively. Gay worked as a professor of political science at Columbia University from 1948 to 1955, and as a professor of history from 1955 to 1969. He later taught at Yale University from 1969 until his retirement in 1993. In 1959 he married with Ruth Slokin. The couple adopted three children. He was named Sterlig Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University.

Contributions

Gay's first interest was intellectual history or the history of ideas. Her first successful book, Voltaire's Politics (1959), examines Voltaire as a politician and how his political ideas formed the backbone of his writings. Following the success of that book, Gay continued with a broad cultural history of the Enlightenment, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966), a book for which she received the National Book Prize and the Mecher Book Prize. His 1968 book, Weimar Culture, about the Weimar Republic, has been considered a milestone in cultural history. On the other hand, she became increasingly interested in psychology after Freud, Jews and Other Germans (1978), which is an analysis of the impact of Sigmund Freud's ideas on German culture. Since then, many of his works focused on the social impact of psychoanalysis, and made him one of the greatest historians of the subject, himself a follower of Sigmund Freud.

Awards and recognitions

• AHA Academic Merit Award (American Historical Association)

Work

• The Dilema of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein’s Challenge to Marx, 1952.
• Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist1959.
• The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment1964.
• The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. The Rise of Modern Paganism1966.
• The Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America1966.
• The Bridge of Criticism: Dialogues on the Enlightenment1970.
• Historians at Work1972.
• with R. K. Webb, Modern Europe1973.
• The Enlightenment: A Comprensive Anthology1973.
• Style in History1974.
• Art and act: On Causes in History – Manet, gropius, Mondrian1976.
• Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture1978.
• Education of the Senses1984.
• The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud - 5 vols, 1984-1998 (includes The Education of the Senses and The Cultivation of Hatred)
• Freud for Historians1985.
• The Tender Passion1986.
• A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis1987.
• Freud: A Life for Our Time1988.
• "The German-Jewish Legacy-and I: Some Personal Reflections" pages 203-210 from American Jewish ArchivesVolume 40, 1988.
• Editor A Freud Reader1989.
• Reading Freud: Explorations & Entertainments1990.
• Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities1993.
• The Cultivation of Hatred1993.
• The Naked Heart1995
• The Enlightenment and the Rise of Modern Paganism revised edition, 1995.
• Pleasure Wars1998.
• My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin1998 (autobiography).
• Mozart1999