ABSTRACT
Specialists have arisen about each of Freud’s five most extensive case histories. Perhaps the Wolf Man has drawn the most interest, partly because he lived such a long life and contributed his own memoirs and interviews; the Wolf Man’s story was composed by Freud as a part of his war with Jung, which has enhanced interest in the case. Only Dora has now become a heroine, as part of the cause of some feminists, and this is so even though I remain tempted to think that Freud was glad (as I have already suggested) to be done with her, once he had enough material for his case history; Dora’s partisans are apt to see in Freud’s therapeutic conduct only mistake after mistake. The Rat Man, who died so soon during World War I after his treatment was concluded, has also given rise to recent partisanship, since it today seems established that Freud cooked his own evidence to make it appear that the Rat Man was in therapy longer than was actually true, and the therapeutic result sounds more like old-fashioned suggestion rather than the so-called pure gold of analytic insight. As for the fourth of Freud’s case histories, Little Hans, other than the fact that Freud chose to ignore the marital break-up which his parents were going through, the charm of Freud’s account, the first ever of a child analytic case, has generally succeeded in holding the reader’s attention.
