The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud

It is a well known that the Wolf-Man was the subject of what James Strachey described as 'the most elaborate and no doubt the most important of all Freud's case histories'. It is less well known that he was still living in Vienna more than half a century since his analysis with Freud.

In this remarkable biographical account, the Wolf-Man comes alive not only through Freud's case history, which is reprinted in full, and Ruth Mack Brunswick's account of the follow-up analysis which she conducted, but also through his own autobiographical memoirs covering his childhood in Russia, his recollections of Freud, his marriage, and the circumstances of his life in Vienna after the First World War. The story of the Wolf-Man's later years is told by the editor of this volume, Dr Muriel Gardiner, who kept in close touch with him following the shattering suicide of his wife in 1938.

The Wolf-Man needed immense resources of vitality to live through the emotional and material losses that he sustained. There can be no doubt that it was Freud's analysis that saved him from a crippled existence, and he himself was convinced that without psychoanalysis he would have been condemned to lifelong misery.