Peter Gay is perhaps the best known and best respected of today's Freud
scholars. In the Freud Reader he has made provided unprecedented
access to a wide range of Freud's writing in a single volume. Read his
short introduction and come to class prepared to discuss your responses
to the following questions.
1. Explain why Freud's thought is "risky", and why Freud is both inescapable and disregarded in contemporary culture.
2. Discuss Freud's "doubly marginal" status, and his relationship to what he called the "compact majority". How did this effect his personality?
3. Explain and discuss the "three assaults on mankind's megalomania". What do you think is the Christian response to these three assaults?
4. Explain the implications of Freud's insistence that psychoanalysis was a part of natural philosophy. What consequences did this have for his view of religion? How do you respond?
5. Your editor, Peter Gay, asserts that:
"... his [Freud's] general model of the mind - the central role of the dynamic unconscious and of the defensive maneuvers in mental work, the continuing impact of infantile sexuality and aggression on adult life, the inescapabilty of inner conflict - remains a solid, indeed indispensable, contribution to our knowledge of the human mind."
Evaluate and react to this assertion.
6. Why has Freud been pictured by some as an intolerant pseudo Pope eager to excommunicate heretics from the religious fold of psychoanalysis? How does Gay defend him from this charge?