The Wolfman

Sigmund Freud's case history follows a wealthy young Russian man whose psychotic episodes and neurotic symptoms troubled him for years. The analysis centres on a recurring dream about wolves from the patient's childhood, which Freud used as the key to understanding what lay beneath the man's suffering.

Freud traces the patient's condition to an infantile neurosis, which he links to a sexual complex and an Oedipal fixation. The case shows how psychoanalysis reads dreams and early memories as clues to adult illness, and it remains one of the best-known examples of the method in practice.