Introduction

The papers published in this issue of American Imago were originally presented at the 80^th Oral History Workshop of the APsaA meetings in February 2018. The topic of the workshop, “The Wolf-Man: Past and Present Encounters,” was chosen to mark the centenary of the publication of Freud's “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” , an iconic case that has generated a complex and layered theoretical and clinical legacy.

The aim of the workshop was to shed new light on Sergei Pankejeff's life before his analysis with Freud, and his long “afterlife” as Freud's most famous patient. Contributors used diverse historical sources and documents—some well-known and others newly available—to produce a rich trove of six papers that are an important contribution to scholarship on Sergei Pankejeff's life and its meaning for contemporary psychoanalysts.

For example, Olga Umansky's paper, “The Wolf Man's Russia,” draws on Russian and Ukrainian sources to present an absorbing visual and narrative description of the history of the Wolf Man's's family in Odessa, and the palatial estate where he spent his childhood and youth. John Baker's “Light and Darkness in Landscapes by the Wolf Man” is a close study of the Wolf Man's's creative process and a sensitive reading of how the vicissitudes of his psychological life found expression in his art.

Pankejeff's afterlife as an iconic psychoanalytic patient is documented in his relationships with the analysts Muriel Gardiner and Kurt R. Eissler. “Muriel Gardiner and the Wolf Man: Preserving a Legacy” by Erika Schmidt explores the important role that Gardiner played in the Wolf Man's life and the ways that her personal history and friendship with Anna Freud influenced this role.