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Robinson joins Peter Gay as the new paladin of the Freudian camp. His purpose in this book is to debunk Freud's critics and to set the record straight regarding Freud's intellectual standing.
He chose Sulloway, Masson, and Grunbaum as the most disquieting critics. Robinson, following Gay sets the yardstick for what he considers “really Freudian”; in this way he establishes his own cannon of acceptability.
In regards to Sulloway, Robinson doesn't miss any opportunity to bash him. He finds Sulloway's argumentation on Freud's neurologic background and some of his alliances to evolutionary theory irrelevant if not unworthy of Freud's main corpus. He fails to recognize that Freud struggled throughout his life to explain principles in at least two realms: a) proximate, clinical and b) distant, broader, all encompassing explanations (a grand unifying theory, if you may). Sulloway's scholarship addresses the latter; there are not good reasons to dismiss those propositions; that Freud shows some evolutionary coloring and that there is significant biologizing in his writings should not surprise us. To do away with Freud's forays into ultimate causes means to reduce the richness and integrative power of his thinking. Robinson's thrashing of Sulloway's work is regrettable. Unfortunately, historians (and this is also true for Peter Gay) lack empathy for Freud's medical background, and for his efforts to incorporate biologic and neurologic concepts into his synthetic theorizing.
The secton on Masson raises a number of questions. Is Masson on the same intellectual level as Sulloway and Grunbaum? Certainly not. Has Masson advanced a body of theory that deserve a stimulating discussion? Certainly not. Why has Robinson elevated Masson's intellectual stature? Masson's notoriety stems mostly from outrageous claims he's made regarding Freud's personal integrity: Why Robinson deals with Masson in such a gingerly fashion?
Robinson advances the idea that the seducation theory never disappear a