From the History of an Infantile Neurosis

Freud's case history of the patient known as the "Wolf Man", a young Russian aristocrat. Rather than recounting the adult illness and its treatment as a whole, Freud concentrates on the infantile neurosis that lay behind it. The centre of the account is a childhood dream of white wolves sitting in a tree, which Freud traces back to the child's sight of parental intercourse, the primal scene, at the age of one and a half; the scene, he argues, acquired its meaning and its traumatic force only later, by deferred action. The case also examines the boy's animal phobia, his religious obsessions, his anal erotism and his castration anxiety, and reports Freud's decision to set a time limit to the treatment. Written in 1914 and published in 1918, it serves at the same time as a defence of infantile sexuality against the revisions of Jung and Adler.