The Wolfman, a paradigmatic case in psychoanalysis

The case of Sergei Kostantinovitch Pankejeff went down in history under the name of The wolf man. It appeared related in a writing by Sigmund Freud that bore the name of History of a childhood neurosis. It corresponds to one of the most paradigmatic cases of psychoanalysis, since it supports many of Freud’s theses.

Sergei Pankejeff, the wolfman, arrived at Freud’s office when I was 23 years old. The father of psychoanalysis treated him for four years, from 1910 to 1914. The patient came from Russia. He was the son of a woman who was excessively concerned about his physical health and of a man who had alternating stages of hyperactivity and depression.

One of his paternal uncles suffered from paranoia and lived like a savage among animals. Another had caused a scandal by trying to force his son’s girlfriend to marry him by force. A cousin of his also suffered from delusions of persecution. In sum, in the context of The wolf man there were many signs of instability.

Immediate background

When The wolf man He was 15 years old, his only sister, two years older, committed suicide. A year earlier she had already shown severe symptoms of depression. A couple of years later, Sergei’s father also took his own life.

When he was approximately 17 years old, he contracted gonorrhea due to contact with a prostitute. Since then He had several depressive episodes and was admitted to several clinics. He was diagnosed with manic-depressive disorder.

Likewise, he developed serious health problems. In particular, a chronic cold and atrocious gastrointestinal disorders. When he arrived for the consultation with Freud he was very weak. At first he seemed quite secretive.. He seemed as if psychoanalysis itself did not matter to him, although he followed everything that was indicated to him.

To get him out of his passivity and give him back the initiative, Sigmund Freud decided to announce the end of the intervention. for the following months. A bond had already been established between the two and it was before the consciousness of the end that The wolf man He began to get involved in the analysis, bringing appreciable content to the sessions. This allowed him to build her case.

The wolf man

The case was named that of The wolf man because it was a dream about wolves that allowed us to begin to elucidate all of Sergei’s unconscious dynamics.. In reality, the dream had taken place when the patient was 4 and a half years old, but it had made a strong impression on him throughout his life.

In the dream, Sergei saw how the window in his room opened by itself. It was winter. On the branches of a huge walnut tree there were six or seven completely white wolves.. They had big tails like foxes and straightened their ears like dogs. They were still and looked at him insistently. The boy felt terrified and woke up screaming, with the feeling that the dream had been something very real. Sergei drew his dream for Freud.

In psychoanalysis, dreams are like hieroglyphs that must be deciphered. The elements that appear in it are symbolic and from the experiences that surround the subject, the associations that give meaning to the dream content can be established.. That was what Freud did in the following years with the wolfman.

infantile neurosis

From the aforementioned dream, Freud begins the path back to several experiences from his patient’s childhood.. He discovers that when she was half a year old he witnessed his parents’ intercourse. From this, Freud designed the concept of “primordial scene”. He also found the werewolf’s childhood sexual experiences with his sister and an attempted seduction and subsequent rejection by his babysitter.

He also found that he had had an obsessive experience with religion.. She prayed for several hours and kissed the figures of saints before going to bed. However, she couldn’t help but, at the same time, feel very bad for what he did and believed.

After going through this entire constellation of experiences in detail, Freud concludes that the wolfman embodies a case of repressed homosexuality. In his opinion, Sergei was cured after psychoanalysis.

However, after the First World War, the patient was analyzed again with another psychoanalyst. Later published an autobiography in which he said, whether true or not, that the dream of the wolves had been his invention. The case has been reinterpreted hundreds of times throughout history and continues to generate controversy.

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