Coda: Sigismund's Wolves

As the essays in this issue vividly illustrate, Freud's "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis"—ubiquitously known as the "Wolf Man" case—can still lead the reader, one hundred years after its publication, down many fascinating yet little-traversed paths. And deep in the forest is the animal that, despite having its name endlessly evoked as the moniker for Freud's essay and the person whose story is told there, remains largely unseen. So, as we conclude this commemoration of Freud's well-known case, we will let the wolves have the last word.

To use the occasion of revisiting this text as a chance to consider the complexities of lupine fears and fantasies would seem, in part, to carry forward the way in which these animals figure in the story. After all, "six or seven" wolves appear here in the childhood dream of Freud's patient, Sergei Pankejeff, sometime between his fourth and sixth years. He recounted: as he lay in his bed, a nearby window suddenly opened, revealing the pack gazing in as they sat on "the big walnut tree in front of the window" (Freud, 1918, p. 29). Pankejeff awoke "in great terror" (p. 29), filled with the fear of becoming the animals' prey. His associations to the dream included mention of several well-known children's stories that feature a wolf, among them "Little Red Riding Hood." Freud noted that in this popular tale the animal appears to the youthful protagonist twice, once in the forest and again, in a shockingly displaced setting, when she encounters it as it "lies in bed in the grandmother's night-cap" (p. 31). Yet the wolf's disparate guises are effortlessly subsumed here within Freud's interpretation, where they are dispensed with early on in the text. He declares that the animal is "merely a first father-surrogate" (p. 32), both in these children's stories and in his patient's dream.

Freud's dismissal of Pankejeff's wolves occurred a decade after the publication of his Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900) and would appear to corroborate one of the book's primary assertions: the images recalled from sleep are a "manifest" hallucination serving to mask the hidden, and far more psychically freighted, latent meaning. Yet Freud qualifies that binary when he accords some attention to the relationship between two aspects of the dream that Pankejeff still recalls most vividly: the wolves' silence and their gaze (Freud, 1918, p. 33). For Freud, these elements become the nodal points in revealing the veiled "dream thoughts," as he takes a large interpretative leap and argues that the latent meaning may in fact be the opposite of what his patient recounted. The gaze of the animals is actually Pankejeff's own act of seeing and the silence is in fact a "most violent motion" (p. 35) that had wakened the child. Based on these claims, the dream transforms into one concerning a child's witnessing of parental sex, and the ramifications of this "primal scene" become the focus of the case to follow. The only residue of the wolves can be found as an index of the fearsome and complex nature of those in one's proximity—in this case one's parents—as well as the suggestion of the animality of human sexual relations.

But what of the reverse, when the animal embodies the human? In framing wolves in this way, we can see how they came to emblemize, even naturalize, certain traits as part of the character, and defamation, of a specific group of people: European Jewry. In recognizing this, we are afforded the chance, through the dream of a Russian (and Christian) child, to examine images of wolves that appeared to Freud in his own youth. For although the dream may be Pankejeff's, the case is Freud's and so in the final note to this issue on the case, we will turn things around in two ways—privileging the manifest over what Freud enunciated as the latent, and considering Freud's own early history of encountering the wolf (as in Pankejeff's dream) as...