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Iago Galdston, in a lecture delivered at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Topeka, attempts to illumine some of Freud's contemporaries who he feels have been neglected due to their nearness to the brilliant light of Freud's work. He berates the 'far too many [people] among the freudians … who stomp the treadmill of orthodoxy' and who fail 'to reassess the formulations, to test the assumptions and to challenge the procedures by which they function'. Galdston observes that perhaps both the greatness of Freud as well as the opposition he aroused may lie in the fact that he demonstrated to the world of science and intellect the rationality of the irrational and the irrationality of the rational.
Of the important contemporaries of Freud who advanced the nosography of psychiatry enormously and contributed substantially to psychotherapy, Galdston chooses to elaborate on the lives and works of three, Janet, Pavlov, and Meyer who perhaps approached closest to Freud's thinking and work. With each of these he points out both the divergences and the points of confluence with freudian principles. From all of them he derives a plea for 'freer activity on the part of the therapist', because passivity in psychotherapy is 'too often the refuge of the bewildered, the insecure, and the indifferent therapist'.