Freud and His Critics by Paul Robinson Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1993,  281 pp., $25.00

I came to sneer but stayed to admire. Why to sneer? Because a book that seeks explicitly to do no more than defend Freud from three of his modern critics, composed as a “duty” (p. 8), was going to be nothing more than an exercise in intellectual spoiling, driven by overidentification with the Great Man, and likely to be claimed by the Freudian establishment as a decisive counterblow. Why to admire? Because it isn't like that. Robinson does not build a wall around Freud, the better to hold him close. Instead, he is critical of others who have tended to do that. Rather, Robinson expends his energy in an outward direction, seeking a polemical wresde with an ill-assorted but prominent trio of critics of Freud: Frank Sulloway, Jeffrey Masson, and Adolf Grünbaum. This grapplefest certainly generates as much heat as light (in spite of the academic proprieties that are always observed) but, for me, and especially in depth psychology, heat is often as useful as light and, anyway, is absolutely unavoidable.

This well-researched and organized book can be summarized as a series of three dyadic disputes which I will lay out as follows:

Robinson versus Masson