You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Wolf-Man, Freud's most famous case, survives at the age of 84 (at the present time of writing), more than 60 years after arriving in Vienna to begin his lengthy career as an analytic patient and an even longer one, in Freud's words, as 'a piece of psychoanalysis' (p. 150). It is fitting and fortunate that his own reminiscences should now be included in a single volume with the original study, 'From the History of an Infantile Neurosis' (1918) and the 'Supplement' by Ruth Mack Brunswick (1928). How instructive, and what a desirable precedent, to extend the dyadic analytic process into the recording of a case, as this one indeed discloses!
Muriel Gardiner, whose personal friendship with the Wolf-Man goes back more than four decades, has, in the past, written about his later life and persuaded him to write about himself. Now she may be credited with sponsoring this valuable autobiography which she has edited, annotated, equipped with her past impressions of him as well as a diagnosis, and provided with an introduction. Freud's article is reproduced from the Standard Edition and Brunswick's from Fliess's Psychoanalytic Reader. A foreword by Anna Freud completes the compendium.
As Miss Anna Freud points out, this has remained a favourite teaching case because of the detailed documentation and the artistry of the presentation, rare qualities in analytic works. Now the Wolf-Man, unlike the rest of Freud's famous patients, is available for the reconstruction and follow-up of his treatment. 'What he proudly reports as his analyst's acknowledgement of his first-class intelligence not only stood him in good stead throughout his personal life but was instrumental also in benefiting the psychoanalytic community as a whole' (p. xi), she observes.
The Wolf-Man's career as a prime—if not the prime—teaching case in analysis began almost with the inception of his treatment in 1910, when Freud was being challenged by Adler and Jung as to the part played by infantile sexuality