Chapter X. The Wolf Man (The Primal Scene)

The case of the Wolf Man is to my mind the most important case history in the whole of psycho-analytic literature and in all of Freud's work; for the Wolf Man was what might be called an encyclopaedia of psycho-pathology. Moreover, I believe this particular case was Freud's premier clinical experience because all the work that follows seems to be deeply involved with it. It opened up the phenomenon of the primal scene to him. Now this was something which Freud had in fact conceptualized very early on, but which - probably owing to his diminished interest in the idea of specific aetiology - he later put aside. It was not until he was faced with the Wolf Man and his extraordinary dream and the evidence of the impact of the dream on the child's development, that Freud took it up again. In a way it is this theory that gives proper psycho-analytic form to all of Freud's theories about sexuality; for although they had been, as it were, announced in the ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’, they were not built upon a foundation of psycho-analytic data, but merely from psycho-analytical modes of thought applied to ordinary medical and psychiatric data.

In the case of the Wolf Man, however, the data and reconstruction are purely psycho-analytical; and for that very reason it is convincing only in so far as one is already convinced. In other words, for people who view psycho-analysis from the outside it stands as a particularly ridiculous episode in psychoanalytic literature. From the evidence of a dream remembered from childhood, Freud reconstructs a scene of parents in their underclothes during the day, having intercourse three times from behind, witnessed by a child of one and a half years, who passed a stool. One can understand that it might seem ridiculous, but it is probably quite correct and, in the context of Ruth Mack Brunswick's account fifteen years later of her subsequent treatment of the Wolf Man, the dream is most enlightening. For during this second analysis - which was