Peter Gay 彼得·蓋伊 (Hillel Itlalie )

Peter Gay, historian who wrote about Freud and the Enlightenment, dies

專精弗洛伊德和啟蒙運動的史學家彼得·蓋伊過世

By Hillel Itlalie May 12

Peter Gay, a popular and prizewinning historian who meticulously traced the rise of secular Western thought, from a history of the Enlightenment to a best-selling biography of Sigmund Freud, died May 12 at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.

彼得·蓋伊是位史學家，著作風行，屢獲要獎。從啟蒙運動史到暢銷的弗洛伊德傳記，他認真追查西方世俗思想的興起。他5月12日在曼哈頓的家中去世，得年91。

His stepdaughter, Elizabeth Glazer, confirmed the death. No specific cause was given. 他的死亡，由繼女伊麗莎白格拉澤所證實。沒給特定的死亡原因。

The German-born Dr. Gay wrote more than 25 books, including a five-part series on the 19th century and two volumes on the Enlightenment, and was a longtime professor at Yale University. He also wrote about Mozart, 19th-century fiction, 20th-century cinema and, in his highly regarded 1968 study, “Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider,” about art and intellectual life in Germany before Hitler’s rise.

蓋伊博士出生於德國，出書超過25本，其中包括5部探討19世紀系列書*和兩冊探討啟蒙運動的書**。他長期在耶魯大學任教。他還寫了關於莫扎特，19世紀的小說，20世紀的電影，1968年出版的《魏瑪文化 :外來精英化成內部功臣》***研究，探討希特勒的崛起之前德國的知識份子圈和藝術，受到高度重視。

*《布爾喬亞經驗：從維多利亞到弗洛伊德》The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, 5 vols., 1984-1998

《感官的教育》"The Education of the Senses" (1984), 中文版2015

《溫柔的熱情》”The Tender Passion" (1986)

《仇恨的滋生》"The Cultivation of Hatred" (1993),

《赤子之心》"The Naked Heart" (1995)

《樂趣之戰》"Pleasure Wars" (1998)

**

***《魏瑪文化 : 一則短暫而璀璨的文化傳奇》，《威瑪文化 : 外來人轉為圈內人》

Western Europe was the setting for much of Dr. Gay’s work and Freud was a recurring subject. An urbane and nonbelieving Jew, like Freud, Dr. Gay found in him not only a compelling life and body of work, but an approach to history. Dr. Gay studied at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and advocated Freudian techniques for historical scholarship, rejecting fears that the field would be reduced to formulas about childhood desires and neuroses.

蓋伊博士的著作多以西歐為研究背景，一再探討弗洛伊德相關的主題。他就像弗洛伊德，是位沒信教的、溫文爾雅的猶太人。蓋伊認為弗洛伊德的一生和全套的著作、思想都很可觀，又可作為歷史研究的方法。蓋伊博士曾在西新英格蘭研究所研究過心理分析，提倡以弗洛伊德技術來研究歷史，他也認為該領域”會被化約為關於童年期的慾望和神經官能症的公式”是無稽之談。

 “Freud was not a historian, but he knew that men’s minds, even their unconscious minds, change across time and differ across class,” Dr. Gay wrote. “Concern for individuality, that mark of the historian, pervades all of Freud’s writings.”

“弗洛伊德不是歷史學家，但他知道人類的心思夢想，甚至知道其潛意識所思，它們會隨時間的變化，各階級也有所不同，”蓋伊博士寫道。 “歷史學家的標誌是關注個性，而這在弗洛伊德的著作中處處可見。”

 Dr. Gay wrote several works on Freud and summed up his findings in the best-selling “Freud: A Life for Our Time” (1988). Freud’s integrity had been questioned and his theories challenged, but Dr. Gay praised his “long and unrivaled career as the archaeologist of the mind.”

蓋伊博士寫了幾本弗洛伊德相關的書，將其發現總結於最暢銷的《弗洛伊德：為我們時代寫的傳記》（1988年）。有人質疑弗洛伊德的一貫性，他的理論受到挑戰，但蓋伊博士稱讚他“作為心靈的考古學家的生涯，既長期而又是無與倫比的。”

 In “Modernism: The Lure of Heresy,” published in 2007, Dr. Gay invoked Freud as a hidden influence on some of the most important artists of the past century.     

蓋伊博士2007年出版的《現代主義：異端的誘惑》中，他認為弗洛伊德對上世紀一些最重要的藝術家有看不見的影響。

“If much of the Freudian view of the human animal present and past appears to be fairly commonplace today, that is so because for a century much of the respectable world has made its progress toward him,” Dr. Gay wrote in the book’s preface.

“如果現在和過去的人類動物的大部分弗洛伊德的觀點，今天看來是相當平常的，這是因為一個世紀來這一可敬的世界的許多進展，都是趨向弗洛伊德的，” 蓋伊博士在書中的序言寫道。

Dr. Gay is also credited, through a series of essays and books in the 1950s and ’60s, with changing the image of Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire from impractical idealists to astute visionaries able to work within the systems they helped overturn. Although he was criticized for focusing too narrowly on Western Europe, Dr. Gay helped define the Enlightenment era as a completion of the revival of ancient Greek culture that began with the Renaissance.

蓋伊博士在下述有功：通過20世紀50年代和60年代的一系列文章和書籍，將啟蒙思想家的形象改變，如能將伏爾泰的形象，從不切實際的理想主義者轉為能在系統內工作---他們又協助將其推翻掉，精明、有遠見。雖然蓋伊博士被批評為焦點過窄，只限於西歐，但他幫助人們界定啟蒙時代實為源於古希臘文化，文藝復興繼續努力的接棒。

 Dr. Gay received the National Book Award in 1967 for his first volume of “The Enlightenment: An Interpretation,” subtitled “The Rise of Modern Paganism.” In 2004, he was given a lifetime achievement award by the American Historical Association, which praised him as a scholar who “incarnates the life of the mind.”

蓋伊博士的《啟蒙運動：一種解讀：現代異教精神的崛起》(The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism , 1966)榮獲1967年的國家圖書獎。2004年，美國歷史學會授他終生成就獎，讚揚他是位”讓人類心靈的一生活龍活現”的學者。

He taught at Yale for 24 years before retiring in 1993.

他在耶魯大學任教24年，1993年退休。

Peter Joachim Froehlich was born June 20, 1923, in Berlin. His father was a businessman.

他原來的德國姓名是Peter Joachim Froehlich，生於1923年6月20日。父親經商。

As a child, Dr. Gay read German author Karl May, and was later deeply impressed and influenced by the prose of Ernest Hemingway and E.B. White. Unintended inspiration came from an anti-Semitic teacher who declared, when Dr. Gay was about 12, that “Jews always exaggerate.”

蓋伊博士小時喜讀德國作家Karl May的作品，之後讀海明威(Ernest Hemingway)和E.B. White的散文，驚為神筆，頗受影想。他12歲左右時，一位反猶太的老師宣稱”猶太人總是誇張”的，這無意間讓他想多去研究猶太人與歐洲文化。

 “I have often wondered whether my unremitting search for precision in my writing was fueled by this outburst,” Dr. Gay wrote in his 1998 memoir “My German Question: Growing up in Nazi Berlin.”

“我經常懷疑這輩子不懈地追求精確的書寫，是否受到這偶然事件的影響，”蓋伊博士在1998年的《我的德國問題：在納粹柏林長大的故事》這樣寫道。

The Froehlichs were assimilated, but no more welcome than other Jews in Hitler’s Germany. The family fled in 1939, first to Cuba and then to the United States. Dr. Gay changed his name upon becoming an American citizen in 1941, making a direct translation of “Froelich” into English.

他的猶太人家族已被德國同化了，不過在希特勒統治下的德國不再受歡迎。於是他家族在1939年逃亡，先到古巴，再轉往美國。蓋伊博士在1941年入籍美國時，將姓名改成Peter Gay，即將原姓“Froelich”直譯成英文的”Gay”。。

He graduated from the University of Denver in 1946, then went to Columbia University, where he received a master’s degree in 1947 and a doctorate in 1951 in political science.

他1946年字Denver 大學畢業，然後到哥倫比亞大學的政治學研究所就讀，1947年取得碩士，1951年取得博士學位。

He taught history at Columbia from 1962 to 1969, then joined Yale as a professor of comparative and intellectual European history. In 1959, he married Ruth Slotkin, an award-winning author of books about Jewish life who was previously married to the sociologist Nathan Glazer. She died in 2006. Survivors include three stepdaughters.

從1962年到1969年他在哥倫比亞大學教歷史，之後到耶魯大學歐洲史教授 (以比較和知識份子的研究為主)。1959年他與Ruth Slotkin結婚---她是位猶太人生活的作品得獎者，最先是社會學家Nathan Glazer的夫人。

Dr. Gay wrote in a fluid, assured style and drew upon a vast knowledge of history, culture, philosophy and psychology. In his memoir, however, he noted that his extensive scholarship on European culture included little about the Nazis.

蓋伊博士的文風，流暢而自信，融合廣泛的歷史、文化、哲學和心理學的知識為一爐。然而，他在回憶錄中說，他在歐洲文化的的學術作品範圍頗廣，卻對納粹黨卓著墨不多。

“The truth is, I must confess, that I have deliberately refused to dwell on the mass murder of Europe’s Jews,” he wrote. “We all have our defenses to help us get through life and these happen to be mine. I am not proud of them, but I see no need to apologize for them.”

“真正的理由是，我必須坦承，我刻意不想去碰歐洲猶太人的大屠殺上。”他寫道，”我們的生活中總會有些心理防禦機制幫我們度過難關—就我而言，”猶太人的大屠殺”正是我的關卡。這些防禦機制並沒什麼值得驕傲的，不過我也不須要為它們道歉。

— Associated Press