ABSTRACT
To psychoanalysts this first chapter of the Wolf-Man’s Memoirs will be of special interest because it covers the same period of his life as Freud’s From the History of an Infantile Neurosis. The little boy’s earliest memory, apparently, was of an attack of malaria when he was lying in the garden in summer. This actual memory would seem to be of the same summer as the reconstructed observation of the primal scene. Memories of the English governess, including the two screen memories mentioned by Freud, appear here, and we learn also of other governesses who followed. Miss Elisabeth, who came when the English governess left, probably several months before the boy was four, used to read aloud in the evening from Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the stories which played such a role in the choice of the Wolf-Man’s animal phobia, and he and his Nanya listened with fascinated attention. Mademoiselle, a little later, introduced the child to the story of Charlemagne, and he compared himself with this hero who had had all possible gifts dropped into his cradle by benevolent spirits. We understand the analogy when we remember Freud’s statements that, because he had been born with a caul, a “lucky hood,” the Wolf-Man had throughout his childhood “looked on himself as a special child of fortune whom no ill could befall,” and that his adult neurosis broke out when he was “compelled to abandon his hope of being personally favored by destiny.”
