Voices of the Wolf Man: The Wolf Man as Autobiographer

Although Freud's (1918) case history of the Wolf Man, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” continues to generate interest and scrutiny both as a psychoanalytic and as a literary document, little critical attention has been given to the Wolf Man's autobiographical accounts. Portions of the documents began appearing in 1957; yet reconsiderations of Freud's analysis of the Wolf Man have made only limited, casual use of them. This indifference is surprising because the documents offer rich and rare data both for psychoanalysis and for autobiography.

Brought together by Muriel Gardiner (1971) in the volume, The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man, the autobiographical material includes The Memoirs of the Wolf-Man (written between 1957 and 1970), “My Recollections of Sigmund Freud” (written in 1951), and a selection of letters to Gardiner beginning in 1948 and extending more than 20 years. Together, they are an intriguing document of self-revelation; and, considered with the most intimate form of biography, the case history, they present an unusual opportunity for mutual corroboration of analytic and autobiographical truth. This material — particularly the letters — has further psychological significance in what it reveals about the therapeutic effects of the autobiographical process.

Because of the dangers of distortion and falsification when one attempts to reconstruct experience and to write a literary as well as a factual document, there is always the question of the validity of autobiography. The Wolf Man—landscape painter and lover of literature—had a highly developed esthetic sense and wrote with conscious literary intent. He claimed to have kept himself “down to reality, without mingling poetry and truth, and without ornamenting truth with fantasy” (1971, p. 343). Yet he was always conscious of his memoirs as