"Peter Gay" is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). Gay received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He is the author of more than twenty-five books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a multi-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968), a bestseller; and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).

Peter Gay was born in Berlin, Weimar Republic/Germany in 1923 and immigrated to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University’s History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History, and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.

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To have a liberal temperament is a kind of psychological boon, To be able to understand that someone you disagree with is not just a terrible creature but somebody with whom you disagree.

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And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.

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My definition of modernism took a while to develop.

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I am not comfortable with the life-against-death generalization that Freud makes; it strikes me as too convenient.

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I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did.

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Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

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What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

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My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right.

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There is something very intriguing about, for example, the sense of accomplishment that a small child has, which you might be able to reduce to aggression and libido, but which might also have some independent existence.

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