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amount of documentation about this particular patient: letters,
transcripts of interviews, and even the draft of an unpublished case
history by the Wolf Man's second analyst, Ruth Mack Brunswick.
Freud's own case history of the Wolf Man focused on an infan–
tile neurosis connected with a childhood dream of wolves. Freud
hypothesized that at the age of one, the Wolf Man had witnessed
intercourse between his parents,
coitus a tergo.
This incident was,
Freud thought at the time, absolutely essential in giving a concrete
answer to both Alfred Adler and Jung; for while Jung in particular
had maintained that infantile data arose defensively in a clinical con–
text as a maneuver to distract the therapist and enable the patient to
evade a current life task, Freud held to the concept that childhood
incidents were in themselves capable of being pathogenic. (Mahony
could have done more to make plausible the reservations by Jung
and Adler.)
Freud never mentioned that as an adult the Wolf Man prac–
ticed anal intercourse . I raised the matter parenthetically in
Freud
and His Followers
(1975)-a book Mahony cites. But he does not deal
with the Wolf Man's adult sexuality. Ruth Mack Brunswick, when
writing in 1929 about what the Wolf Man, according to Freud, had
seen, added : "In part this observation, in part the predominantly
anal nature of the patient himself, resulted in making this his usual
form of sexual intercourse. Indeed, he practiced regularly not only
coitus a tergo,
but also anal intercourse." Brunswick's comment ap–
peared in the official journal of the international psychoanalytic
movement, and her name has been ineluctably linked to that of the
Wolf Man ever since Freud's referral of his expatient to her for fur–
ther analysis. Yet the conformist pressures of the profession seem to
have ordained that the Wolf Man's sexual preferences never receive
appropriate attention .
Although Freud discusses the connections to homosexuality, he
tells us nothing about the Wolf Man's adult sexual practices. What
are we to make of the contrast between what Brunswick tells us to
have been true, and this eerie silence elsewhere? Reticence, repres–
sion, deception, or ignorance seem as significant as any of the Wolf
Man's "cries." The WolfMan's sexual practices, I believe, influenced
Freud's reconstruction of the supposed infantile neurosis. And non–
reproductive sexuality as well seems to have played a more in–
teresting part in Freud's thought than has been acknowledged.
Freud's special interest in the Wolf Man might have been partly
fueled by, for example, the anal intercourse that Freud disguised in
