How I Came Into Analysis with Freud

Introduction by Muriel M. Gardiner, M.D.

Some of you who have read of my earlier meetings with the Wolf Man may be interested to know that I saw him again in January, 1957, the day following his seventieth birthday. He had aged in appearance in the last years, but was as alert and interested as ever. I knew that he had been writing occasional articles, and asked whether he had ever written anything about Freud or about his own analysis. At our next meeting he brought me a manuscript entitled "My Recollections of Sigmund Freud, " of which the following is a translation of about the first third.

I first met Freud in the year 1910. At that time psychoanalysis and the name of its founder were practically unknown beyond the borders of Austria. Before I report on how I came into analysis with Freud, however, I should like to recall to you the desolate situation in which a neurotic found himself at that period before psychoanalysis. A sufferer from neurosis is trying to find his way back into normal life, as he has come into conflict with his environment and then lost contact with it. His emotional life has become "inadequate, " inappropriate to outer reality. His goal is not a real, known object, but rather some other object, hidden in his unconscious, unknown to himself. His affect bypasses the real object, accessible to his consciousness. As long as nothing was known of this state of affairs, only two explanations were possible: one, that of the layman, concerned itself with the increase in intensity of affect, which was out of proportion to the real situation; it was said that the neurotic exaggerated everything. The other explanation, that of the neurologist or psychiatrist, derived the mental and emotional from the physical, and sought to persuade the