ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a comparative reading of Freud’s canonical case study “From the History of Infantile Neurosis” and of the memoir written by the protagonist of that case study, Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man. A bond was forged between Freud’s text and the subject who was given a pseudonym in that text, a person who became a persona and lived his adult life with the dual identity of Russian émigré and the subject of Freud’s famous case. The diverse cast of contributors Gardiner’s The Wolf Man and Sigmund Freud allows us to view the complex web of relationships among them. An essential component of Freud’s case study is the dramatic construction of the primal scene the patient allegedly experienced when he was an infant of 18 months. The childhood dream and the reconstruction of the primal scene are of course not mentioned in the memoir.
