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In the Foreword to this book, Anna Freud comments on the inadequacy and incompleteness of the numerous previously published case histories of psychoanalytic patients. Now, through the unstinting devotion and encouragement of Muriel Gardiner, the Wolf-man has written his memoirs and his recollections of Sigmund Freud. Republished are Freud's Case of the Wolf-Man, the account of his first analysis, and Ruth Mack Brunswick's A Supplement to Freud's 'History of an Infantile Neurosis'. The book concludes with Muriel Gardiner's narrative of her more than thirty years' acquaintance with the Wolf-man.
The book is unique in several respects. It is the only record of its kind (and will so remain) of a famous case of Freud's for which the analysand has written an autobiography. These memoirs provide an excellent background for a restudy of Freud's case history and Brunswick's later analysis. The psychoanalytic works integrate well with the memoirs, and one has a feeling that it is indeed of one person that all the chapters are written. This point is worthy of mention since often studies of the nacht-welt of an individual seem so unrelated to that person seen in the setting of his external world. Unique also is the Wolf-man's Recollections of Sigmund Freud. While this chapter reveals nothing not already known of Freud's humanness and analytic skills, the quality of the writing is direct, simple, and urbane.
Especially useful is the opportunity the book offers for seminars on this case history, part of the curriculum of every psychoanalytic