Freud’s Wolf Man

Review of Lawrence Johnson, The Wolf Man’s Burden. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Hardcover ISBN 0-8014-3875-6, x, 188 pages, $41.95.

Who is the Wolf Man, and why should we be concerned about his burden? Lon Chaney sprouting fangs and facial hair under a full moon? It is not this one, but rather the other one: Sergei Pankeev (1887-1979). A promising painter of landscapes and student of literature, he was a “typical Russian intellectual” at the beginning of the last century, according to Alexander Etkind’s history of psychoanalysis in Russia (Eros of the Impossible, p. 81). As a youth, Sergei developed symptoms, which he later called “unconscious grief,” which were viewed at the time as depression. According to Etkind, Pankeev felt his life hollow and his experiences unreal, and others seemed like wax figures or marionettes (p. 84). After a foray into hypnosis, he traveled to Munich to consult with the renowned Kraepelin, who diagnosed him as manic-depressive, as was his father. By 1910 Pankeev ended up on Freud’s couch. Early in his treatment, he recalled a dream of waking to the sight of several wolves perched on the walnut tree outside his bedroom window and staring in at him. Terrified of being eaten, the four-year-old screamed and awakened. In analysis he made a sketch of the dream-vision for Freud.

Thus was born the Wolf Man, whose terrors form the core of one of psychoanalysis’ most famous case histories. “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” was written by Freud in 1914 and published in 1918 when World War I ended. Freud famously interpreted the dream as a primal scene derivative, that is, of Sergei’s early exposure to parental lovemaking in the mode of mating beasts. The case material was tailored to Freud’s urgent needs to confirm his theor-

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ies of infantile sexuality and counter the skepticism of Jung and Adler. But what was intended to be a decisive victory proved to be the opening salvo in battles that still flare up today. Not only did the issues not get resolved—the Wolf Man did not get cured. He returned from time to time to Freud but was also passed on to other analysts. By the time he expressed his own misgivings in memoirs and conversations, there were casebooks within the analytic community and extensive second-guessing outside it (see Muriel Gardiner, ed., The Wolf Man by the Wolf Man, 1971, and Karin Obholzer, The Wolf Man Sixty Years Later: Conversations with Freud’s Controversial Patient, 1982).

Lawrence Johnson’s title captures the paradox of the Wolf Man: burdened to be both the exemplar of psychoanalysis and its failed patient—its “greatest prize and [Freud’s] archnemesis” (p. 2). While the nature of his conflicts may have rendered him a pawn in psychoanalytic politics, Johnson supports those who see a strong personal level of interest on Freud’s part. Not only did he see Sergei daily six times a week for four years, but he also offered occasional free analysis, took up a collection for him when he emerged penniless after WWI, and exercised a certain veto power over his wedding plans. Noting that the key image for the West is Oedipus but that that of the East is the Sphinx, Etkind proposes that “Freud was drawn to Dostoevsky and Pankeev because … their conscious minds had more direct access to the universal mechanisms of the unconscious” (pp. 96-97). On the other hand, Johnson quotes sources who maintain that Pankeev’s linguistic dexterity (he had a polyglot mix of English, German, and Russian) fostered a tendency to speak in a sort of “crypt,” which in the analytic situation worked as resistance and rendered him an “enigma” (p. 64; Johnson also uses crypt more idiosyncratically to address a sort of preserved and protected intrapsychic burial chamber, or “monument of a lost object preserve within the split ego” (p. 15), the meaning of which is far from clear to me). That Freud in any case did not deeply hear his patient or penetrate these barriers raises issues of countertransference. His technical papers around this time were exploring psychoanalysis as the love-cure, that is, drawing on the ways the patient transfers feelings and fantasies from prior libidinal ties to the analytic situation; but Freud lagged somewhat in exploring how analysts bring their own baggage into analytic work. He tended to interpret manifest events, such as the dream, in terms of latent layers revealing an archaic past. This is what happened when the Wolf Man’s dream was interpreted as a primal scene fantasy, which both reinforced and threatened the foundation stones of the psychoanalytic edifice being constructed during the 1914-1918 period.

So it is not difficult to appreciate how generations of scholars continue to be intrigued by this material. Johnson’s contribution issues from a careful reconstruction of the two men’s lives, and how their personal histories, unresolved conflicts, and current preoccupations could likely have become interwoven. Pankeev’s “personal history” seems “to have echoed Freud’s own internal drama” (p. 23). In this scenario, the “institution of psychoanalysis had reached an impasse as a result of Freud’s attempt to work through particular repressed material of his own,” and then “found its reflection (its mirror image and exact opposite) in the Wolf Man’s crypt, leading Freud to posit the Wolf Man within his own internal drama as a rival for the control of psychoanalysis….” (p. 18). This is a large, extremely ambitious enterprise. It is given some support through careful and often ingenious readings but must remain speculative insofar as the intensely private exchanges of a protracted analysis can never be fully reproduced and are inevitably prone to selective recollections, distortions, and overdetermined revisions. Instead of encoding a primal scene, the Wolf Man’s dream for Johnson encodes other infantile material that reverberates cryptically between the two parties. Revisiting previous analytic speculations from Ernest Jones that the death of baby Julius when Freud was 18 months constituted his primary trauma, and that baby sister Anna, arriving soon after, inherited this complex, according to Max Schur, Johnson proposes an alternative. “Let us consider that if Sigmund had wished away his sister like he claims to have done with Julius, he will have seen his wishes realized in an unthinkable event: he wishes Anna away, but it is the other Anna (his Amme-Nana [the family nanny] who disappears.” She was fired by his mother, allegedly for stealing (which Johnson questions). Thus through the “medium of a homonymic confusion,” he loses his “surrogate mother-object” (p. 61). The Wolf Man also had a nanny, one given to cautionary folktales of werewolves and prone to restraining male children by grabbing their genitals, and he had a rivalrous-libidinal tie to his sister Anna, which entailed fantasies (or instances) of genital-fondling. The number

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of wolves in the dream as six (which also was given as seven, and was five in the drawing) lends itself to a provocative chain of associations linking sister – sex – siesta (the afternoon nap the parents would take which involved lovemaking) in part through the Russian siestorka (sister) and shiestorka (pack of six) (p. 137).

All of which is intriguing, but Johnson’s argument is weakened by what strikes this reviewer as gratuitous diversions into current academic trends. For a short, extremely concentrated study, it is dismaying not to have the principals stage-center for the first 55 pages. Instead there are excursions into the writings of Lacan, to Derrida’s problematics, to a cameo appearance of Nietszche, to extensive treatment of Stephen Greenblatt’s theories of improvisational writing as self-fashioning (which Freud supposedly practiced), and on to invoking something called “heterothanatography” (p. 19). In concluding, Johnson injects the question of his own transference only to embark on a “general understanding of the transference relation” (p. 175). Regrettably, all these flights of ideas succeed only in distracting and diluting from Johnson’s main points.

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