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Freud's case histories, and the one by Breuer: what are they to us today? Holy relics and fetishes for faithful Freudians, museum memorabilia for the masses, or, as of late, fodder for Freud-bashers? Jacob Arlow has pleaded for their relegation to the analytic attic, on the grounds that the whole lot of them is both dated and flawed. I disagree. Flawed they may be, but interest in them should never fade. For these legendary cases, coeval with the creation of psychoanalysis more than a century ago, remain an integral part of a discipline that is defined and determined by its history, and so should preserve its history. That conviction is clearly demonstrated in this book. It is a revisiting of seven Freud's cases, a labor of love by six Freudian analysts from Sweden: the above-named editors, Johan Norman, Rolf Künstlicher, Lars Sjögren, and Andrzej Werbert.
Now a case history, like a painting or sculpture, is but a distillate of clinical work. It is a facet or a part abstracted from the whole, real, historical person who loved, lived, and suffered and also free associated and resisted on the couch, involved in a real and transferential relationship with the analyst. In this way the couch gives birth to unique personal histories. And these particular cases, formerly disguised, came back to life long after they were published as subjects of ever widening posthumous historical and biographical investigations. Thus Anna O. returned as Bertha Pappenheim, Elisabeth von R. as Ilona Weiss, Emmy von N. as Fanny von Moser, Katharina as Aurelie Clothilde Katharina Kronich, Cäcilie M. as Anna von Lieben, Little Hans as Herbert Graf, Dora as Ida Bauer, the Rat Man as Ernst Lanzer, and the Wolf Man as Sergey Pankeyev. The only unidentified case in this book is Lucy R. As the research into Freud's patients has grown, a new