Problems of the Therapeutic Alliance: Freud and the Wolf Man

Our interest in problems of the therapeutic alliance has grown out of our work in which we conduct therapeutic psychoanalyses which simultaneously include a research goal. Our patients, as part of their treatment, sleep one night every four months in a laboratory where they are awakened at the end of each dream (by electroencephalographic criteria) to report their mental content. In addition, each analytic session is tape-recorded.

We have noted a number of consequences for the transference–countertransference issues in these analyses and several difficulties which seem to bear specifically on the development of the therapeutic alliance. In reviewing the literature on psychoanalyses conducted with a simultaneous research interest, we found nothing which specifically illuminated the nature of the patient's thoughts and fantasies about his analyst's research interest, particularly as personified by the analyst's research colleagues. By colleagues we mean either those with whom the analyst is literally engaged in his work, or those who comprise the wider audience of his peers, to whom our patients seem equally sensitive. Nor did we find any directly explanatory statements about the consequences for the analyst of having a simultaneous research interest in his patient.

As part of our effort to understand these problems, we turned to Freud's analysis of the Wolf Man. It has been a part of the history of psychoanalysis that the patient known as the Wolf Man was of particular interest to Freud because of his unique role in the development of the theory of infantile sexuality. In this sense, the treatment was clearly an example of a therapist with a simultaneous research interest in his patient which might make this patient special to him and thereby create problems for the therapy. This possibility is well documented by Jones, who describes that, following his first course of treatment from February 1910 to July 1914, the Wolf Man returned again several years later f