The 'Wolfman' and Other Cases

‘Little Hans’/The ‘Ratman’/The ‘Wolfman’/Some Character Types Encountered in Psychoanalytic Work

‘Engrossing … Freud’s narrative method gives a grandeur of scale to these histories of ordinary lives’ 
Gillian Beer

When a disturbed young Russian man came to Freud for treatment, the analysis of his childhood neuroses – most notably a dream about wolves outside his bedroom window – eventually revealed a deep-seated trauma. It took over four years to treat him and ‘The Wolfman’ became Freud’s most famous case.

This volume also contains the case history of five-year-old Little Hans’s fear of horses; the Ratman’s violent fears of rats gnawing into his father and lover; and the essay ‘Some Character Types’, in which Freud draws on the work of Shakespeare, Ibsen and Nietzsche to demonstrate different kinds of resistance to therapy. Above all, the case histories show us Freud at work, in his own words.

A new translation by Louise Adey Huish with an Introduction by Gillian Beer

General Editor: Adam Phillips