A Few More Thoughts on Sergei Pankejeff

I would like to begin by quoting my colleague Lila Kalinich, who wrote the following in connection with a seminar on the Wolf Man some 30 years ago:

I can think of few fates worse than having one's life and psychology reviewed and re-interpreted by generations of psychoanalysts. To me, this is a vision of Hell that rivals both Dante and Steven Spielberg, a prison of mindless pretensions encasing a life. Yet such was the destiny of the Wolf-Man, Freud's most famous case. Since the inception of his analysis in 1910, his pimples, bowel movements, sexual preferences and dreams have preoccupied scores of Freudian friends and foes.

(1994, p. 167)

While there may be an element of humorous hyperbole here, we are indebted to Kalinich for reminding us of the very human dimension of the experience of Sergei Pankejeff. Her comments capture something important about the fate of this icon of psychoanalysis, both during his long life, and since his death in 1979, almost 70 years from the time he began his famous analysis with Freud. His analysis and second treatment with Freud in the late teens, his treatment with Ruth Mack Brunswick in the 1920s, and his long friendship and follow-up with Muriel Gardiner have been amply detailed elsewhere. His longevity provided six decades more interaction with various members of the analytic community. Subsequent to his death, several generations of clinicians, literary critics, and others have now had the opportunity to interpret and re-interpret his life and psychology, as well as Freud's famous treatment of him. All psychoanalysts, in a sense, are indebted to him, and as Kalinich suggests, we have not always been as respectful or appreciative as we might have been.

Even without the Wolf Man's long afterlife in the psychoanalytic community, Freud's longest and most famous case history would still hold special place. As Blum noted in 1974, Freud "would never again provide clinical material of such sweep and depth." I would argue that this is precisely the point: As we know, Freud didn't write very many case histories. Still fewer did he write of people he had actually analyzed. Furthermore, he wrote virtually all of them with an important motive of driving home a theoretical point. He essentially stopped writing detailed case histories after this one, for the remaining two and a half decades of his life, during which he wrote profusely. So, Freud provided us with precious little clinical material on the whole, and no longer case histories at all that incorporated the momentous changes ushered in by his structural theory, second dual instinct theory, and important re-considerations of anxiety and defenses in the over twenty years from the late teens to 1939. We are left with the reports of his analysands, like Abram Kardiner, to glean any idea of his actual clinical technique during Freud's last decades, when his theory and psychoanalysis had evolved drastically, and definitively, away from the analysis of symptoms and in the more complex direction of character and defense analysis, so central to all psychoanalytic clinical activity since. Thus, with the Wolf Man it is precisely the experience of reading material of such immediacy and depth that still captivates us. This case history offers both the most immediate window, and in some ways the last, into the actual experience of an extended two-person clinical encounter in Freud's consulting room.

Rereading the case again, I am struck by the hints of immediacy between the lines of Freud's text. It is easy to become lost in the content of the Wolf Man's analysis, but part of what captivates us are the many suggestions of the aliveness of the encounter scattered throughout. Here is one example:

Personal peculiarities in the patient and a national character that was foreign to ours made the task of feeling one's way into his mind a laborious one. The contrast between the patient's agreeable and affable personality, his acute intelligence and his nice-mindedness on the one hand, and his completely unbridled...