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By Karin Obholzer. New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1982, 250 pp., $14.95.
In the history of psychoanalysis no patient has been as famous, or as notorious, as Serge Pankejeff, Freud's Wolf Man. While Dora, lately reincarnated as a heroine of the feminist movement, is as well known, she as yet has not been the subject of two lengthy books. Nor did she write an autobiography, as far as we know, or submit to over 40 hours of interview. Dora, unlike the Wolf Man, did not make a career of patienthood, but no one, ever, is likely to equal the Wolf Man in that respect. From 1910 when he first saw Freud, until his death at 92 in the Vienna Psychiatric Hospital on May 7, 1979, the Wolf Man was in analysis, more or less, on and off for almost 70 years, a record not likely to be surpassed until human longevity is significantly increased.
The Wolf Man was unique in other respects as well. He was diagnosed, at various times, as obsessional, paranoid, depressed, anxiety-ridden, hypochondriacal, schizophrenic, compulsive, guilt-laden, psychotic, delusional, and narcissistic—a veritable nosology of psychiatric symptomatology. The number of his illnesses apparently was more than matched by the number of psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, neurologists, and nerve specialists he consulted during the course of his long life. The roster included, in addition to Freud, Ruth Mack Brunswick, Muriel Gardiner, "Kraepelin" (I list the names as they appear in the book under review), "Bekhterev," "Ziehen," "Lubin," "Drosnes," "Dr. E., an Austrian analyst who had emigrated to the United States and was working at the Freud archive in New York" (presumably a rather thinly disguised Kurt Eissler), "Dr. S." of Vienna, "Dr. D.," "Winterstein," "Professor Anton," "Wein" or "Weiner," and many others; the Wolf Man also corresponded with