Freud and His Critics

"A work of major interest to both scholars and general readers, splendidly conceived and splendidly executed."--Judith Hughes, author ofReshaping the Psychoanalytic Domain "With admirable clarity, Paul Robinson painstakingly reconstructs and then relentlessly dismantles the arguments of Freud's most tenacious and recent debunkers. The results stunningly vindicate the abiding power of psychoanalysis as a master discourse of our age."--Martin Jay, Professor of History, UC Berkeley"A magnificent contribution to the ever-growing and discordant industry of Freud scholarship. Robinson incisively assesses the critiques of three of the most formidable Freud adversaries--Sulloway, who would recast Freud as a crypto-biologist, heir to Darwin and forerunner to modern sociobiology; Masson, who faults Freud as a failed social reformer and a presumed moral coward; and Greenbaum, who sees Freud as a positivistic natural scientist unequal to his chosen task--and persuasively demonstrates the differing ways in which they each thoroughly misread Freud, each (differently) building the most unsubstantial of revisionary arguments. Their greatest 'crime,' in Robinson's perspective, and this they share in common, is a fundamental trivialization of the towering genius who more than any other single individual has shaped the modern sensibility and has been the most important modern theorist of the individual."--Robert S. Wallerstein, M.D., Past President, International Psychoanalytical AssociationRobinson, Paul W. is the author of 'Freud and His Critics' with ISBN 9780520080294 and ISBN 0520080297.