The story of the wolf man - the most famous patient of Freud, or the Odessa stumbling block of psychoanalysis

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Name Sergey Pankeev became known all over the world due to the fact that this Odessa landowner was beloved the patient of Sigmund Freudwith whom he worked for several years. He dedicated his book to him, where, for the sake of anonymity, he called the patient "the wolf man." Because of this nickname, many legends were born around Pankeyev's name, although the reasons for choosing such an ominous pseudonym were much more prosaic than the stories that were told among the people about the owner of the "Wolf's Lair" in the village of Vasilyevka near Odessa.

Sergei Pankeev was born into a wealthy merchant family in Odessa. From the age of four he was tormented by the same nightmare: he dreamed that 7 huge white wolves were sitting on walnut branches outside the window and watching him. The fear of wolves began to haunt him, and his phobia became associated with himself. In order to identify the patient without giving his name and to maintain confidentiality, Freud began to refer to him as "the wolf man."

Freud was not the first psychoanalyst to work with Sergei Pankeev. The first signs of depression appeared after his own sister, having visited the place of Lermontov's duel in Pyatigorsk, suddenly committed suicide, and after her father passed away from an overdose of sleeping pills. Sergei turned to Russian psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev and his German colleague Emil Krepelin for help. Then, on the advice of the Odessa psychoanalyst Leonid Droznes, he went to Vienna to see Sigmund Freud. And he became his patient for many years.

Initially, Pankeev was diagnosed with "manic-depressive syndrome", but Freud did not agree with this and called the cause of his phobia obsessional neurosis. And the psychoanalyst called the sexual intercourse of his parents seen by the boy in childhood as the impetus for its development. And although Pankeev himself did not agree with this explanation (“all this was impossible, because in the families of my circle, children always slept with a nanny, not with their parents”), Freud insisted on his own, calling the patient “the most valuable of all discoveries that good fortune left me to do. " He described this incident in the book From the History of a Childhood Neurosis. After its publication, Sergei Pankeev became known all over the world as "The Wolf Man", although he himself did not hide his name.

However, Freud's treatment did not give the desired results - the symptoms of the disease were repeated. The psychoanalyst explained this by the fact that the patient stopped treatment too early "for fear of changing his fate and the desire to remain in his usual comfortable environment." Later, Pankeev wrote his memoirs about his treatment, where he confessed: "While undergoing psychoanalysis with Freud, I felt not so much a patient as his collaborator - a young comrade of an experienced researcher who took up the study of a new, recently discovered area."

Pankeev never got rid of his phobia. He later became an insurance lawyer, after the revolution he moved from Odessa to Vienna, where he died at the age of 84. And in his homeland, the estate in Vasilyevka began to be called "Wolf's Lair" and ridiculous fables were told about its owner: about how the landowner ran on all fours at night, how he ate raw meat and drank the blood of domestic animals, etc.

For more than 100 years, Pankeev's case has been of interest among scientists around the world. Psychoanalysts today are trying to understand what Freud's mistake was and why his method was ineffective. According to one version, the reason for this is the language barrier. The key to the problem had to be found not in the wolves, but in … the nut! In the Russian language, the meaning of the idiom "give on nuts" implies the threat of punishment for some kind of offense. And the child took this phrase, heard, presumably, from the nanny ("here I will give you some nuts!") Took literally. And his dream is just a realization of the fear of punishment. However, this version is also controversial.

Only ruins remain from the Pankeyevs' estate near Odessa. During the Civil War, the estate was plundered and the forest was cut down. The garden gradually fell into decay and disappeared. In Soviet times, the village council was located in the estate. Built in the middle of the 19th century. the building required major repairs and began to collapse. Now only the walls are left of it.

The great psychoanalyst himself could become an interesting patient for a psychiatrist: oddities and phobias of Sigmund Freud