Freud A Life for Our Time By Peter Gay 810 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $25.

It has been nearly 50 years since Freud's death, nearly a century since he began to formulate the underpinnings of psychoanalysis, and it is clear, in retrospect, just how accurately he predicted his fate - as he once put it, to ''agitate the sleep of mankind.'' The picture of man that Freud bequeathed to the 20th century, after all, was a peculiarly modern and disturbing one, a picture of man as a conflicted creature, torn by his dual yearnings for love and death and besieged by unconscious impulses only barely held in check by the blandishments of civilization.

The Freud who emerges from Peter Gay's intelligent and wholly absorbing new biography is himself a contradictory figure: ''an unreconstructed nineteenth-century gentleman in his social, ethical, and sartorial style'' whose revelations about sexuality would shock his contemporaries and indelibly shape the next century's intellectual discourse; ''the nemesis of self-deception and illusions'' who fearlessly used himself as a guinea pig yet fiercely guarded his own privacy; a map maker of the mind who redefined the limits of reason and yet made his own life a model of self-control.

Thanks to his own writings and a vast body of secondary literature, Freud already boasts a minutely annotated life. Mr. Gay, a cultural historian who has written several shorter studies of Freud, has obviously drawn on earlier sources (as well as such new material as Freud's highly revealing correspondence with his friend Wilhelm Fliess, which was published in its entirety for the first time in 1985), but he has produced a judicious, original biography, scrupulously grounded in close readings of his subject's work.

The book is neither reverential, like Ernest Jones's famous life of his mentor, nor as judgmental as other more recent studies. Instead, Mr. Gay situates Freud's theories within a cultural and historical context while tracing their relationship to the psychoanalyst's own life. As a result, we become privy to the fascinating dialogue Freud maintained in his mind between ''private feelings and scientific generalizations,'' and we are made to see that ''beneath the surface of his rational argumentation, there lurks Freud the disappointed father, the concerned mentor, the anxious son.''

Like such biographers as Paul Roazen, Mr. Gay contends that Freud's controversial views of women (as a kind of castrated man, lacking a strong superego, etc.) grew out of his ''larger cultural loyalties, his Victorian style'' and his reluctance to come to terms fully with his own mother. Mr. Gay also argues that Freud's frustrating four-year-long engagement to Martha Bernays left its mark on his theories about the sexual nature of neurosis, and he notes that the death of Freud's daughter Sophie in 1920 (combined with several other losses) could have contributed to the development of ''his late psychoanalytic system, with its stress on aggression and death.''

After sketching in Freud's family background (the weak father, the strong-willed mother, the proliferation of siblings), Mr. Gay quickly moves on to look at just how Freud assembled the rudiments of psychoanalytic theory and how the fledging psychoanalytic movement slowly accrued international recognition even as it was riven by internal dissent. Some of these scenes, drawn with novelistic care by Mr. Gay, verge on low comedy, what with the psychoanalysts wildly coining self-serving analyses of one another. Freud dubbed Alfred Adler's actions ''the revolt of an abnormal individual driven mad by ambition''; he described Jung as ''all out of his wits,'' and he characterized Otto Rank as ''an impostor by nature.''

In describing these battles, Mr. Gay is careful not only to delineate the Oedipal clash of personalities that was exacerbated by Freud's need for enemies as well as friends but also to communicate the underlying conflict of ideas. He characterizes ''Totem and Taboo'' as Freud's attempt ''to anticipate, and to outdo, his 'heir' and rival'' Jung and ''Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety'' as a response of sorts to Rank's defection.

For the lay reader, in fact, one of the virtues of this biography is Mr. Gay's lucid and succinct analysis of Freud's essential texts and his assessment of their relationship to one another: from ''The Interpretation of Dreams'' (1899) and ''Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality'' (1905), which articulated the basic principles of psychoanalysis, through the reformulations laid out, after the war, in ''Beyond the Pleasure Principle'' (1920) and ''The Ego and the Id'' (1923) - works that helped define, as Mr. Gay puts it, ''a general psychology'' that reached beyond the world of neuroses to that of ''normal mental activity.''

With such subsequent books as ''The Future of an Illusion'' (1927) and ''Civilization and Its Discontents'' (1929), we see Freud moving even further into the realm of speculation as he formulates a psychoanalytic theory of religion, politics and culture. Although there had always been a dark streak of determinism in his work, these two late works were to be his most somber and pessimistic. ''Life, as it is imposed upon us,'' he wrote, ''is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments, insoluble tasks.'' It is as though, he added, ''the intention that man should be 'happy' is not contained in the plan of 'Creation.'''

No doubt these sentiments mirrored Freud's own fears of aging and death as well as his growing anxiety about the events overtaking Europe. In March 1938, the Nazis marched into Austria; in June, Freud and his family left Vienna for London. The following year, suffering from terminal cancer, he died after asking his doctor for a fatal dose of morphine
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THE TENDER PASSION: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud. By Peter Gay. 490 pages. Oxford University Press. $24.95. In the first volume of his massive examination of bourgeois life during the 19th century, the historian Peter Gay took it upon himself to re-examine the sexual behavior and attitudes of the Victorians, both here and in Western Europe. ''Education of the Senses'' (1984), as that volume was called, proved to be a witty, erudite and controversial study that challenged many of the stereotypes commonly held about that not so distant era - besides arguing that the middle classes of that period were considerably more interested in sex than its genteel manners suggested, the book presented a thoroughgoing reassessment of the role and nature of Victorian women, persuasively arguing that the old image of them as repressed, frigid, anesthetic creatures was as inadequate as it was demeaning.

Now, in ''The Tender Passion,'' a sequel of sorts to that earlier volume, Mr. Gay proposes to take a detailed look at Victorian notions of love -love as an ideal of bourgeois life and love as a day-to-day reality, realized by actual couples. Almost immediately, however, Mr. Gay runs into problems. For one thing, given the contiguous nature of love and sex, he often has difficulty confining himself to a discussion of the issue at hand and hence strays into material familiar from ''Education of the Senses'' (i.e. repression and its consequences) or material more appropriately discussed in that previous work (i.e. prostitution and homosexuality).

Secondly, he has an irritating tendency to impose strict Freudian interpretations on all his subject matter (trains are always taken as erotic symbols, as are gardens, banquets and department stores), combined with a tendency to manipulate his data - even the most obdurate - to serve his own didactic ends. For example, in arguing that love was the ''governing preoccupation'' of 19th-century novelists, he writes that even ''a novelist like Gogol who, from desperate psychological conflicts of his own, sought to excise any intimations of deep erotic involvements in his fictions, paid indirect tribute to love by his energetic exertions to evade it.''

To make matters worse, many of the points Mr. Gay seems to want to make in this book end up striking the reader as obvious: his observation, for instance, that Victorian marriages were ''not just the source of conflicts, but also a means for their resolution''; or for that matter, his assertion that generalizations are difficult to make, that ''idiosyncratic intimate histories and the divergent pressures exerted by religious allegiances, social distinctions, and national habits must make any description of characteristic middle-class styles in love and sex richly polychromatic.'' Of course, the reader's inclined to say, who was ever foolish enough to suggest that Victorian couples were all unhappy, or that a single sweeping generalization could sum up the temper of the times?

Largely as a result of these problems, ''The Tender Passion'' reads less as a spirited, original inquiry into social history, than as a fluently written compendium of Victorian love stories, anecdotes and quotes. As such, however, the book is informative, occasionally illuminating and often entertaining, offering the reader a variety of Victorian definitions of love, ranging from Novalis' romantic conception of love as a kind of applied religion (''love is the final purpose of world history - the amen of the universe'') to Diderot's cyncial assessment of love as no more than ''the voluptuous rubbing of two intestines'' to Freud's dictum that love requires the uniting of ''two currents,''''the tender and the sensual.'' The volume's discussion of love as portrayed in the fiction of Trollope, James, George Eliot, Proust, Dickens and Flaubert attests to both an enormous amount of reading and a mind well versed in the use of psychoanalysis as an interpretative technique. And the chapter titled ''Stratagems of Sensuality'' provides the reader with a lively, if somewhat arbitrary, sampling of the ways in which Victorians found ''displacements'' for their erotic desire. Wagner's operas, Mr. Gay observes, ''manifestly embodied, and boldly staged, sexual longings and fulfillments that ordinary mortals keep to themselves''; while the 19th-century ''love of nature'' cult ''held the most profitable possibilities for the sensual,'' locating all manner of erotic metaphors and analogies in such natural phenomenon as ''the delicious shiver'' of aspen leaves and the rhythmic waves of the ''fiery sea.''

As in ''Education of the Senses,'' Mr. Gay has culled an enormous amount of material from diaries, letters, novels, medical texts and philosophical treatises, and he again attempts to extrapolate readings about society and class from individual case studies. His overall conclusions, too, echo those of his earlier book -namely that the Victorian era was essentially a century of transition, a time of change, during which those two contradictory impulses - toward freedom and toward control - came clashing noisily together, creating in their wake nervousness and confusion.

In the arena of love and sex, this meant that fiercely felt passions were often cloaked beneath decorous facades; that privacy and reticence -those twin gods of the good bourgeois household - frequently concealed a high measure of tolerance and liberality. ''Their defensiveness was a tribute to passion,'' Mr. Gay writes, ''displaying a wry respect for its powers. It invites the paradoxical speculation that the century of Victoria was at heart more profoundly erotic than ages more casual about their carnal desires and consummations.''

As Mr. Gay adds, that very guardedness on the part of the Victorians also creates difficulties for the historian intent on deciphering their lives. And that, in the end, may in part, explain the sketchiness of ''The Tender Passion.''

Photo of Peter Gay

Reading Freud

Explorations and Entertainments

By Peter Gay

204 pages. Yale University Press. $24.95.

In his monumental biography of Freud that appeared in 1988, the historian Peter Gay created a rich and compelling portrait of the father of psychoanalysis - a portrait that situated Freud's theories within a cultural and historical context and that explored the relationship of those theories to his own life. The reader came to know Freud ''the disappointed father, the concerned mentor, the anxious son,'' as well as Freud the fearless researcher - a man shaped by 19th-century values and ideals, and yet at the same time committed to the articulation of theories that would indelibly transform the 20th century.

Though the very thoroughness and erudition of that volume would seem to preclude any immediate follow-ups, Mr. Gay points out that ''as Freud has taught us, there is always more to know about people, even fully documented ones.'' He has accordingly produced this fascinating new collection of essays, which attempts to ''reduce the blank spots'' remaining on the map of Freud's mind - to ''appproach, and partly resolve, the mystery that is Freud.''

In the opening essay of this book, Mr. Gay notes that Freud himself was obsessed with unsolved mysteries and riddles: ''They troubled him as an unresolved chord troubles a musician. Conundrums did not just fascinate him; they tortured him.'' This ''compulsion to tackle engimas'' led him, toward the end, into two of the ''most eccentric commitments of his life, both revisionist in the extreme'' - his identification of Moses as an Egyptian and Shakespeare as the Earl of Oxford.

Why would Freud develop such an ardent interest in J. Thomas Looney's controversial book ''Shakespeare Identified'' (which laid out a detailed argument for Shakespeare's identity as the 17th Earl of Oxford)? In raising this question, Mr. Gay discounts Ernest Jones's well-known view that ''something in Freud's mentality led him to take a special interest in people not being what they seemed to be'' - that the idea of Shakespeare not being Shakespeare meshed with his childhood wish that he might have been the son of someone other than his impecunious father.

Instead, Mr. Gay identifies shared attitudes that would have made Freud receptive to Looney's ideas; and he discusses how Freud's preoccupation with the ''Shakespeare problem'' reflected his insatiable ''greed for knowledge'' - an ''urge to know'' that was, at least in part, erotic. As Mr. Gay sees it, this urge developed early on in Freud's life: in a large family (five sisters and two brothers), intellectual achievement was a means for young Sigmund to obtain his parents' attention. Figuring out the answers to important riddles -like the question of Shakespeare's identity - was an exercise ''through which he could reiterate his claim to paternal and, even more, maternal love.''

Similar applications of Freudian theory to Freud's own life are made in the essay titled ''Six Names in Search of an Interpretation,'' in which Mr. Gay attempts to analyze the signficance of Freud's choice of names for his children. Pointing out that Freud changed his own name from Sigismund to Sigmund, Mr. Gay argues that ''the bestowal of a name is an exercise of power.''

He goes on to note that Freud named his children after significant individuals in his own life. Mathilde was named after the wife of the Viennese internist Josef Breuer, who had assisted a young and poverty-stricken Freud. Jean Martin was named after the French neuropathologist Jean-Martin Charcot, whom Freud worked closely with in the 1880's. Oliver was named after his boyhood hero, Oliver Cromwell. Ernst was named after Ernst Brucke, in whose laboratory Freud worked for six happy years. Sophie was named after the niece of his former teacher and friend Samuel Hammerschlag, and Anna after one of Hammerschlag's daughters.

As Mr. Gay notes, these choices indicated a deviation from the Jewish tradition, popular in Central Europe, of naming children after deceased relatives: in this respect, he argues, they reflected Freud's irreligiosity, his tendency to see himself as a Jew within ''a larger mental world: that of the European scientific, most specifically the materialist, positivist mind.'' In addition, Mr. Gay suggests, Freud's decision to name so many of his children after father figures or members of their families underscored Freud's continuing struggle to come to terms with his own father; they served as a record of his own ''heroic and historic bid for inner freedom, a freedom that was the essential condition for his discoveries.''

The other essays in this book tend to be less detailed and somewhat less provocative than the two just mentioned. ''Freud and Freedom'' rehashes the idea of determinism in Freud's work - a subject previously addressed by Mr. Gay's biography, as well as other scholarly works, while ''Serious Jests'' rehashes many of Freud's thoughts on humor laid down by the master himself in ''Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.''

The essay on Freud's relationship with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays comes to the hedged conclusion that they probably did not have an affair; and the one on Freud's reading habits comes to the hardly earth-shattering conclusion that the psychoanalyst had a penchant for seemingly conservative works with ''an undertone of rebelliousness'' (asked to assemble a list of 10 ''good'' books, he listed such volumes as Mark Twain's ''Sketches,'' Kipling's ''Jungle Book'' and Macaulay's ''Essays'').

As usual, Mr. Gay combines his authoritative knowledge of Freud's life and works with crisp, engaging prose. If some of the essays in this volume seem somewhat familiar, that is only because we already know so much about Freud from Mr. Gay's own previous biography. All in all, this is a delightful coda to that volume, and a lively and entertaining book on its own.

Photo: Peter Gay (Yale University)