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In Freud's Case Studies: Self-Psychological Perspectives, the editor Barry Magid and six other contributors offer an important reevaluation of Freud's five major case studies (Dora, Little Hans, the Rat Man, Schreber, the Wolf Man) as well as of Freud's study of a young homosexual woman and the case of Anna O, treated by Freud's collaborator, Josef Breuer. They present scholarly surveys of the recent and past psychoanalytic literature along with newer interpretations, formulations, and reanalyses that incorporate contemporary self-psychological understanding.
The Rat Man, in Freud's own view and in the view of most others, had the most successful analysis of all the cases Freud wrote about. I find little evidence from Freud's case material and the chapter written by Kiersky and Fosshage to support their hypothesis that the Rat Man's oedipal problems with his father arose because the father did not supply essential affirming and nurturing selfobject functions to him during the toddler period of development. The authors criticize Freud for not being on the “same wave length” as the Rat Man and for his lack of affective attunement to the Rat Man. This or similar criticisms were made by all of the authors in this volume who reviewed analytic cases treated by Freud.
In reviewing Freud's case study about the Wolf Man, Magid had available additional accounts of the patient's life and treatment, not only by the famous patient himself, but by others who knew him and treated him over many later years. Freud developed an elaborate primal scene interpretation of the Wolf Man's childhood nightmare about white wolves sitting on a tree outside his bedroom windows. As a young child, the Wolf Man, in terror of being eaten by the wolves, screamed and woke up. As Magid argues,