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PARTISAN REVIEW
in the field of psychology or of the neuroses who do not recognize
the postulates of psycho-analysis and who look on its results as
artifacts. But during the last few years there has grown up
another kind of opposition as well, among people who, in their
own opinion at all events, take their stand upon the ground of
analysis, who do not dispute its technique or results, but who
merely think themselves justified in drawing other conclusions
from the same material and in submitting it to other interpreta–
tions.
Hard on the heels of this rather charming assertion of disciplinary
orthodoxy vis-a.-vis Adler and Jung, Freud stated most explicitly
that the presentation of case studies is superior to theoretical debate:
As a rule, however, theoretical controversy is unfruitful. No
sooner has one begun to depart from the material on which one
ought to be relying, than one runs the risk of becoming intox–
icated with one's own assertions, and in the end, of supporting
opinions which any observation would have contradicted. For
this reason it seems to me to be incomparably more useful to
combat dissentient interpretations by testing them upon partic–
ular cases and problems.
The disagreement over the centrality of infantile sexuality
between Freud on the one hand and J ung and Adler on the other led
Freud to focus almost exclusively upon the Wolf Man's infantile
neurosis, the course of which had been terminated in childhood.
This involved him once again in reporting a severe case "only in a
fragmentary manner." As Freud noted in his final chapter, signif–
icantly entitled not "Conclusion" but "Recapitulations and Prob–
lems," "it must be recognized that everything cannot be learnt from a
single case and that everything cannot be decided by it; we must
content ourselves with exploiting whatever it may happen to show
most clearly. Furthermore, problematic and severe cases were found
to have the greatest instructive value and his published "exemplars"
were never completely satisfying resolutions of all the problems in–
volved. The Wolf Man's later difficulties and his reanalysis thus
cannot be a reproach to Freud's treatment of him , but a confirmation
of his expectations.
The "fertile difficulties" of the case of the Wolf Man complicated
the presentation even more than his earlier cases, but Freud pre–
ferred to make this attempt at the risk of overstraining his own
expository powers in order to further the exploration of this
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