Sergei Konstantinovitch Pankejeff was a Russian aristocrat from Odessa best known for being a patient of Sigmund Freud, who gave him the pseudonym of Wolf-Man to protect his identity, after a dream Pankejeff had of a tree full of white wolves.
Biography
The Pankejeff family was a wealthy family in St. Petersburg. Sergei attended a grammar school in Russia, but after the 1905 Russian Revolution he spent considerable time abroad studying. During his review of Freud's letters and other files, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson uncovered notes for an unpublished paper by Freud's associate Ruth Mack Brunswick. Freud had asked her to review the Pankejeff case, and she discovered evidence that Pankejeff had been sexually abused by a family member during his childhood. In 1906, his older sister Anna committed suicide while visiting the site of Mikhail Lermontov's fatal duel, and by 1907 Sergei began to show signs of serious depression. Sergei's father Konstantin also suffered from depression, often connected to specific political happenings of the day, and committed suicide in 1907 by consuming an excess of sleeping medication, a few months after Sergei had left for Munich to seek treatment for his own ailment. While in Munich, Pankejeff saw many doctors and stayed voluntarily at a number of elite psychiatric hospitals. In the summers, he always visited Russia.
Der Wolfsmann (The Wolf-Man)
In January 1910, Pankejeff's physician brought him to Vienna to have treatment with Freud. Pankejeff and Freud met with each other many times between February 1910 and July 1914, and a few times thereafter, including a brief psychoanalysis in 1919. Pankejeff's "nervous problems" included his inability to have bowel movements without the assistance of an enema, as well as debilitating depression. Initially, according to Freud, Pankejeff resisted opening up to full analysis, until Freud gave him a year deadline for analysis, prompting Pankejeff to give up his resistances. Freud's first publication on the "Wolf-Man" was "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis", written at the end of 1914, but not published until 1918. Freud's treatment of Pankejeff centered on a dream the latter had had as a very young child which he described to Freud: Freud's eventual analysis of the dream was that it was the result of Pankejeff having witnessed a "primal scene" — his parents having sexa tergo or more ferarum — at a very young age. Later in the paper, Freud posited the possibility that Pankejeff instead had witnessed copulation between animals, which was displaced to his parents. Pankejeff's dream played a major role in Freud's theory ofpsychosexual development, and along with Irma's injection, it was one of the most important dreams for the developments of Freud's theories. Additionally, Pankejeff became one of the main cases used by Freud to prove the validity of psychoanalysis. It was the third detailed case study, after "Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis" in 1908, that did not involve Freud analyzing himself, and which brought together the main aspects of catharsis, the unconscious, sexuality, and dream analysis put forward by Freud in his Studies on Hysteria, The Interpretation of Dreams, and his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
Later life
Pankejeff later published his own memoir under Freud's given pseudonym and remained in contact with Freudian disciples until his own death, making him one of the longest-running famous patients in the history of psychoanalysis. A few years after finishing psychoanalysis with Freud, Pankejeff developed a psychotic delirium. He was observed in a street staring at his reflection in a mirror, convinced that some sort of doctor had drilled a hole in his nose. Ruth Mack Brunswick, a Freudian, explained the delusion as displaced castration anxiety.
Criticism of Freud's interpretation
Critics, beginning with Otto Rank in 1926, have questioned the accuracy and efficacy of Freud's psychoanalytic treatment of Pankejeff. Similarly, in the mid-20th century, psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley dismissed Freud's diagnosis as far-fetched and entirely speculative. Dorpat has suggested that Freud's behavior in the Pankejeff case as an example of gaslighting. Daniel Goleman wrote the following in the New York Times: Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham have reinterpreted the Wolf-Man's case, presenting their notion of "the crypt" and what they call “cryptonyms." They provide a different analysis of the case than Freud, whose conclusions they criticise. According to the authors, Pankejeff's statements hide other statements, while the actual content of his words can be illuminated by looking into his multi-lingual background. According to the authors, Pankejeff hid secrets concerning his older sister, and as the Wolf-Man both wanted to forget and preserve these issues, he encrypted his older sister, as an idealised "other" in the heart of himself, and spoke these secrets out loud in a cryptic manner, through words hiding behind words, rebuses, wordplays etc. For example, in the Wolf-Man's dream, where six or seven wolves were sitting in a tree outside his bedroom window, the expression "pack of six", a "sixter" = shiestorka: siestorka = sister, which gives the conclusion that his sister is placed in the centre of the trauma. The case forms a central part of the second plateau of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, titled "One or Several Wolves?" In it, they repeat the accusation made in Anti-Oedipus that Freudian analysis is unduly reductive and that the unconscious is actually a "machinic assemblage". They argue that wolves are a case of the pack or multiplicity and that the dream was part of a schizoid experience.
