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  • Introduction
  • Nellie L Thompson, Ph.D.

The papers published in this issue of American Imago were originally presented at the 80th Oral History Workshop of the APsaA meetings in February 2018. The topic of the workshop, "The Wolf-Man: Past and Present Encounters," was chosen to mark the centenary of the publication of Freud's "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (1918), an iconic case that has generated a complex and layered theoretical and clinical legacy.

The aim of the workshop was to shed new light on Sergei Pankejeff's life before his analysis with Freud, and his long "afterlife" as Freud's most famous patient. Contributors used diverse historical sources and documents—some well-known and others newly available—to produce a rich trove of six papers that are an important contribution to scholarship on Sergei Pankejeff's life and its meaning for contemporary psychoanalysts.

For example, Olga Umansky's paper, "The Wolf Man's Russia," draws on Russian and Ukrainian sources to present an absorbing visual and narrative description of the history of the Wolf Man's's family in Odessa, and the palatial estate where he spent his childhood and youth. John Baker's "Light and Darkness in Landscapes by the Wolf Man" is a close study of the Wolf Man's's creative process and a sensitive reading of how the vicissitudes of his psychological life found expression in his art.

Pankejeff's afterlife as an iconic psychoanalytic patient is documented in his relationships with the analysts Muriel Gardiner and Kurt R. Eissler. "Muriel Gardiner and the Wolf Man: Preserving a Legacy" by Erika Schmidt explores the important role that Gardiner played in the Wolf Man's life and the ways that her personal history and friendship with Anna Freud influenced this role. [End Page 463]

The voluminous interviews Kurt R. Eissler conducted with the Wolf Man over a number of years beginning in 1952 are thefocus of Craig Tomlinson's "A Few More Thoughts on Sergei Pankejeff." His paper describes the evolution of Eissler's long, unorthodox, but significant therapeutic relationship with Pankejeff. Tomlinson also points to the continuous, but varying, relationship that the psychoanalytic community has had with the Wolf Man case. Its current contested status, i.e., the question of whether the case should still be included in the curriculum of contemporary psychoanalytic education, is addressed in Soni Nirav's paper "On the Continuing Relevance of the Wolf Man to Psychoanalytic Education"

The Wolf Man case is inextricably linked to Pankejeff's painting of his dream of the white wolves sitting in a tree outside his window. Diane O'Donoghue's paper turns our attention from this image to the illustrations of wild animals, including wolves, familiar to Freud in his youth, thus introducing a new element in the case of the Wolf-Man. Together these papers offer analysts and commentators much material to reflect on as we continue our engagement with Freud's "From a History of an Infantile Neurosis." [End Page 464]

Nellie L Thompson, Ph.D.
Chair of "The Wolf Man: Past and Present Encounters" Workshop
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