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Dr. Lubin's paper, The Influence of the Russian Orthodox Church on Freud's Wolf-Man: A Hypothesis, is an intelligent and skillful study. It is written objectively and modestly and makes more interesting reading than many of the papers published in our psychoanalytic journals. If it were an analysis of the influence of the Church on a character in fiction, it would be in many respects convincing.
But, although the author states that the paper is not intended as “a reanalysis of the Wolf-Man,” it is in fact an attempted analysis, from a distance, of certain traits of a much-analyzed patient, and as such is just what Dr. Lubin calls it: a hypothesis. For this reason it is to me, although interesting, not at all convincing.
I cannot argue with any of Dr. Lubin's statements or deductions, but I am not persuaded that they are real or relevant. Interpretations in an actual personal analysis are automatically tested in the analytic situation itself, and prove themselves valid or not by the patient's reaction and the further course of the analysis. No such thing is possible in this case, nor would the interpreter be able to judge from the patient's apparent reaction whether or not the interpretation was correct. Dr. Lubin himself states: “The Wolf-Man's remarks must be considered in their proper context. He wanted to help me prove my thesis. Hence I am not certain that they were bona fide associations.”
Dr. Lubin writes of his meeting with the Wolf-Man a year later, in August, 1962: “He brimmed with enthusiasm, declared that my hypothesis was probably correct, and failed to
criticize a single point in the manuscript. I became skeptical about this praise when I found he was more reluctant than on the previous visit to probe his memories about religion. He added little to previous remarks, although he talked freely about many other subjects.“ This reminds me somewhat of the Wolf-Man's conciliatory attitude early in his analysis with Ruth Mack Brunswick. Dr. Brunswick wrote: ”F