A History Of Infantile Neurosis - 'The Wolfman'?

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I've just finished reading this, and I'm a tad skeptical to some of the conclusions he came to as regards explaining the man's involuntary - well, shitting himself, and 'stool-babies' in particular, along with associating the 'veil' he claimed stood between him and the outside world - and birth. It seems very far fetched to me.

I'm not being very articulate at the moment, bleh, tiredness. But if you catch my drift that's good enough for me.

I did agree with a lot of the things in the study and I /know/ that he did explain the difficulties of assessing a childhood illness while the man was an adult, but, hmm.

What did you think of it in its entirety?

It's just me, but I found myself questioning a fair few things throughout which seemed to be pretty ridiculous.

Anyway, your thoughts?
Dr. Bob - Wow, I didn't know what the outcome for him was. Obviously not a very good one. :S Good answer, thanks.
 
Well, yes, I can see how you might question a whole lot here! For one thing, Freud had his own way of looking at things , at at this point (1910) he was busy trying to (1) insist that all the members of the Vienna Psycho-analytic Society accept his idea that personality is caused by sex, and (2) stave off the increasing competition for a dozen or so members of the group, lead by Dr. Alfred Adler. As the article in Answers.com puts it:

"Freud used the case to demonstrate the lasting neurotic impact of conflicted infantile sexuality in order to refute the theories of Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. Despite Freud's claim of a complete cure, the Wolf Man continued to be seriously ill for the remaining half century of his life and was seen by many therapists "

http://www.answers.com/topic/from-the-history-of-an-infantile-neurosis-wolf-man

And of course he was not treating a child, but a grown man with lots of personal history behind him.

If you look at the world through rose colored glasses...doesn't everything look rosy? Or if you look at the world throgh a narrow slit in the wall, and not a picture-window, isn't your perception limited to a narrow range?

Well, that's the way it was with Freud: He had developed his approach (with nine years of help by Adler, by the way!!) and his psycho-analytic vocabulary...and then that's all he could see when it came to his patients.

Why did this "wolf man" behave as he did? Lots of "reasons," but Adler's concept of "psychology of use" is the most helpful, I think: We do thigns in order to get something out of it, some result or pay-off we want in the future. So the wolf man's behavior is explained not so much by his past, as by the future things he wanted to have happen.

-- Dr. Bob, Adlerian Psychologist
 
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