Freud’s Case Studies: Personality, Psychology, and Pathology

Consider three diverse individuals who sought therapeutic help from Sigmund Freud: an impoverished Russian aristocrat, a conflicted Austrian army officer, and an American poet and feminist struggling with psychological trauma. Across borderline personality presentations, obsessive-compulsive patterns, and struggles with compulsory heterosexuality, Freud's patients represented vastly different pathologies and social circumstances. Yet each came to him seeking insight and healing. Freud's therapeutic method relied on symptom interpretation, free association processes, and the complex psychological phenomenon he called "transference," in which the therapeutic relationship itself becomes a space of reenactment and asymmetrical personal revelation. Freud stated, "The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him." But who were these patients beyond their assigned pseudonyms? How did Freud actually conduct his sessions, and what was the man himself like in clinical practice?

This course investigates the stories of three of Freud's most celebrated patients: the "Wolf Man," the "Rat Man," and the poet h.d. (Hilda Doolittle). Moving beyond their anonymized case histories, we will examine Freud's published clinical narratives alongside subsequent biographical scholarship by scholars, reassessing his diagnoses in light of these patients' lived experiences and life trajectories. In some cases, we can compare Freud's interpretations with the patients' own first-person accounts. How did Freud progressively refine his therapeutic techniques and develop psychoanalytic concepts such as the primal scene, castration anxiety, sadism, and others? Beyond these theoretical developments, how do these case studies illuminate the historical periods in which his patients lived? How do individual psychological struggles intersect with broader social transformations and world historical events? Alongside Freud's primary texts, we will engage secondary scholarship by Adam Phillips, Stuart Schneiderman, Jacqueline Rose, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Juliet Mitchell, Jacques Lacan, and others.