Abstract
THE WOLF-MAN B Y THE WOLF-MAN is a remarkable book promising narrative coherence while enacting its opposite: a life history shot through with indeterminacy and contradiction. Edited by Muriel Gardiner, volume consists of disparate texts dating 1919 to 1970 by five different authors, all devoted to interpreting life of Sigmund Freud's most celebrated patient. founding text is Freud's From History of an Infantile Neurosis (1914), based on his analysis (1910-14) of a young Russian aristocrat of immense wealth, Sergius Constantinovich Pankejeff. James Strachey termed it the most elaborate and no doubt most important of all Freud's case histories.' book includes an account of a second analysis conducted by Ruth Mack Brunswick, to whom Freud referred Wolf-Man in 1926 in consequence of his suffering from a hypochondriacal idgefixe concerning a scar on his nose (264). Gardiner, herself a psychoanalyst who trained under Brunswick, recounts her long friendship (1935-70) with this special patient who remained throughout his life a ward of psychoanalysis.2 A foreword by Anna Freud cites need for complete and adequately documented case histories and endorses book as the unique opportunity to see an analytic patient's inner as well as outer life unfold before our eyes (ix, xii). These authoritative texts provide setting for Wolf-Man's memoirs, written sporadically over nineteen years toward end of a long life. A selection of photographs Pankejeff family papers serve as illustrations. One double portrait, captioned The Wolf-Man and his sister, Anna, about 1894, at ages of seven and nine shows two children indissolubly linked (fig. 1). older, taller sister stands while her brother sits on a raised support so that their bodies occupy same plane, joined together at head and torso like Siamese twins. Anna's right hand protectively encloses her brother's left, while her left arm encircles him. Elegantly clothed in embroidered dress and sailor suit respectively, their solemn self-presentation mirrors ritual formality of photographic pose. Their introspective gazes convey a sense of sibling solidarity reinforced by conventions of late-nineteenth-century studio portraiture.3
Published Version
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