Patient Background & Symptoms
⚠️ Suffered deteriorating health from age 18, including bowel issues and a feeling of separation, following gonorrhea.
💔 Experienced profound depression after his sister's (Anna, 1907) and father's suicides.
🐺 Developed a significant fear of wolves and other creatures, intensified by a distressing dream of six or seven white wolves watching him.
🙏 Exhibited unusual religious zealousness, kissing icons while experiencing blasphemous thoughts.

Freud's Treatment & Interpretation
🗓️ Underwent four years of psychoanalytic treatment with Freud (1910-1914), with a pre-set end date to lower resistance.
🧠 Freud interpreted his wolf dream and other fears (e.g., caterpillars, witnessing snake-chopping) as manifestations of castration anxiety.
🧐 Castration anxiety was defined as a boy's fear of genital loss/damage due to incestuous desires towards the mother and murderous fantasies towards the father.

Post-Treatment & Legacy
🏥 Despite Freud's initial "cure" pronouncement, Wolfman continued to suffer and sought treatment intermittently for many years from Freud and other therapists.
🎭 Years later, developed psychotic delirium, including a delusion of a hole in his nose, which was reinterpreted as displaced castration anxiety.
⏳ Wolfman underwent analysis for around six decades, making him one of the longest-running famous patients in psychoanalytic history.

Key Points & Insights
💡 The "Wolfman" case underscores the complexity and persistence of deep-seated psychological issues, often requiring long-term therapeutic engagement.
🧩 It highlights the interpretive nature of psychoanalysis, where a single dream or symbol can be linked to core anxieties like castration anxiety.
🕰️ The case demonstrates that Freud's therapeutic outcomes were not always definitive, with patients sometimes continuing struggles for decades.
📚 Provides a historical perspective on early psychoanalytic theory and practice, illustrating its application to severe neuroses and its enduring impact on psychology.

📸 Video summarized with SummaryTube.com on Aug 19, 2025, 12:23 UTC