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Ferenczi. But far from suggesting that Freud's essay failed in its role
of exemplar to help maintain the coherence of the psychoanalytic
community of investigation, this demonstrates the power of the case
study to define the boundaries of the nascent discipline. Reading
Freud's case studies, it seems, not only guided and educated Freud's
followers, but also served to separate less orthodox analysts from the
movement. In fact, Freud's next case study Was even more impor–
tant in separating errant analysts.
Freud's last lengthy case study, his analysis of the Wolf Man,
was written in the winter of 1914-1915 and entitled
From the History
of
an Infantile Neurosis
(1918). This is Freud's most complicated and in–
tricately argued case, and he used it both to demonstrate his tech–
nique to his followers and to define the boundaries of psychoanalysis
by showing how Jung and Adler had excluded themselves from the
group of proper practitioners. But this only further empasizes the
degree to which he relied upon case studies to establish his ideas.
Freud's description in an introductory passage to this study as "an
objective estimation of the analytic material" confirms that he had
ceased to worry about the lack of objectivity and about the fact that
cases were single instances. The case as a whole, furthermore,
contains some of Freud's most explicit statements on the value and
significance of case studies.
One of the central issues of Freud's account of the Wolf Man's
infantile neurosis is closely related to a central theme of the Dora
case: the importance of "libidinal motive forces" in psychopathology.
The difference in Freud's conception of his readers and critics in the
two cases illustrates how he thought psychoanalysis had progressed
in establishing itself as an autonomous scientific discipline.
The criticisms Freud had had to confront at the time he pub–
lished the case of Dora were based on resistance in the medical pro–
fession and the population at large to the very idea of infantile
sexuality. The critics Freud had in mind in 1914-1915 were psychoan–
alytic initiates, prominent exponents of psychoanalysis who had
subordinated the data of infantile sexuality to other factors, such as
the need for power in the case of Adler, or the cultural values of the
collective unconscious in the case of Jung.
In his "Wolf Man," Freud distinguished between kinds of
skepticism about psychoanalytic ideology:
The whale and the polar bear, it has been said, cannot wage war
on each other, for since each is confined to his own element they
cannot meet. It isjust as impossible for me to argue with workers
