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Dr Sergius Pankejeff1 (the Wolf Man) is the most famous of Freud's patients. Strachey, in his editor's note to the original case-history by Freud (S.E. 17, p. 3) writes: 'This is the most elaborate and no doubt the most important of all Freud's case histories' and Ernest Jones, in his biography of Freud (Vol. II, p. 307), claims that 'The case history known as that of the Wolf Man is assuredly the best of the series'.2 Among the many people, many of them non-analysts, who took a quite exceptional interest in the life and later history of the Wolf Man was the Wolf Man himself. He wrote extensively about himself, about Freud and about what Freud wrote about him, and these works were happily preserved and translated in a book edited by Muriel Gardiner (The Wolf Man and Sigmund Freud. New York: Basic Books, 1971) which reached a large and appreciative audience.
This book by Miss Obholzer came as something of a surprise. It was meant to be, and is, sensational. The content, sometimes veiled, at other times openly declared, is a vituperative frontal attack on psychoanalysis and the very psychoanalysts to whom the Wolf Man owes both his fame and his life of reasonable external comfort. The book consists of a series of conversations the Wolf Man had in the last years of his life with Karin Obholzer, a Viennese journalist, primarily about his feelings of having been misused by psychoanalysts, but also about a disastrous affair with a woman described as exceedingly disagreeable who plagued him with monetary requests for years. He felt entitled to a rest from psychoanalysis and resented having been turned into what he called the 'parade horse' of analysis, though it is clear that he turned to psychoanalysts continually for both emotional