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In 1918 Freud published the celebrated case study of the Wolf Man which was meant to demonstrate the truth of psychoanalytic constructions of the past. In particular, Freud (1918) attempted to prove that the Wolf Man's neurosis at the age of four was caused by his witnessing, at the age of one-and-a-half, a scene of parental sexual intercourse. The case was published, in part, as a response to Jung's claim (1913) that people's reconstructions of their origins were based on projections into the past of current conflicts and preoccupations. In the Wolf Man, Freud disputes Jung's claim and argues that the psychoanalytic truth in regard to the cause of neuroses is a historical one which corresponds to real occurrences in the patient's past. It is this insistence on historical truth as the end point of psychoanalytic constructions that makes the Wolf Man of primary importance to contemporary theorists, not only of the psychoanalytic persuasion.
Recent years have witnessed a radical change in our views of science and its progress (Popper, 1959; Polanyi, 1964; Kuhn, 1970;