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The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man with the Case of the Wolf-Man
Book by Sigmund Freud
- GenresPsychologyNonfiction
370 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
About the author
Muriel Gardiner
13 books3 followersGardiner was a psychoanalyst, born in America but trained in Vienna, Austria. She married an Austrian man and was part of the resistance against the Nazis in the late 1930s. After war broke out in 1939, she and her husband moved to the United States.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 13, 2012
I am wedded to this book as I know the author and it involves my own family history. My grandparents were friends of the Freuds, and my grandfather was asked by Sigmund to watch over the Wolf-man...Later in the USA, both my parents knew Muriel Gardiner and her husband, Joe Buttinger, who authored the beautiful children's books Manko. Muriel's story can be read in her book Code Name "Mary". A brave and passionate woman, along with her husband, and a wonderful, brilliant tie back to my own fascinating family history.
October 24, 2025
"Yet even this case has no more merit than the famous "cure" of Freud's Russian patient Sergius Pankejeff a.k.a. the "Wolfman". It is an embarrassment for Psychoanalysis that this most celebrated of all analytic patients was in and out of Psychoanalysis for sixty years".
In: "Killing Freud: Twentieth Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis"
By Todd Dufresne
"The Wolf-Man himself is convinced that without psychoanalysis he would have been condemned to lifelong misery."
Muriel Gardiner in the Introduction
A very good assembly of views: (1) of Wolfman/Sergei when 83 writing about his life, his "Memoires" (2) includes Freud's perspectives on the case and Sergei's views about Freud, (3) Muriel's and Ruth Mack Brunswick's, who [the latter] treated him later in life.
One thing is very clear in the prose of Sergei: he really integrated in his mind the psychoanalytical language of "doctor Freud". There are several instances in his life where he interprets events using a psychoanalytical framework.
"In our childhood it had been said that Anna* should not have been born a girl but a boy. She had great will power and a strong sense of direction, and she always succeeded in evading the influence and the authority of her governesses. As she was growing up, Anna's feminine traits began to appear. Apparently she could not cope with them and they turned into pathological inferiority complexes"
Page 24
And that was a life full of tragedy and physical and psychological suffering. He was Russian by birth. European by life's circumstances.
Why "wolf-man"? Blame his dreams, but also his sister....
* Wolf-man sister
In: "Killing Freud: Twentieth Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis"
By Todd Dufresne
"The Wolf-Man himself is convinced that without psychoanalysis he would have been condemned to lifelong misery."
Muriel Gardiner in the Introduction
A very good assembly of views: (1) of Wolfman/Sergei when 83 writing about his life, his "Memoires" (2) includes Freud's perspectives on the case and Sergei's views about Freud, (3) Muriel's and Ruth Mack Brunswick's, who [the latter] treated him later in life.
One thing is very clear in the prose of Sergei: he really integrated in his mind the psychoanalytical language of "doctor Freud". There are several instances in his life where he interprets events using a psychoanalytical framework.
"In our childhood it had been said that Anna* should not have been born a girl but a boy. She had great will power and a strong sense of direction, and she always succeeded in evading the influence and the authority of her governesses. As she was growing up, Anna's feminine traits began to appear. Apparently she could not cope with them and they turned into pathological inferiority complexes"
Page 24
And that was a life full of tragedy and physical and psychological suffering. He was Russian by birth. European by life's circumstances.
Why "wolf-man"? Blame his dreams, but also his sister....
* Wolf-man sister
July 12, 2023
Though it's meant more for psychologists / psychology students, I found this to be an enlightening introduction to Freud and the state of early 20th century psychoanalysis.
The memoirs, while mostly dry and lacking in focus, set up clearly the problem of the "Wolf-Man," after which Freud's interpretation can be read as the apparently brilliant solution to his conundrum. It's not unlike reading a detective novel, in which the author sets up a complex, winding plot and later unravels it via one character's genius.
Freud's analysis gets progressively more and more out-there the further he gets to the "heart" of Sergei's problems, and while I found the direct sexual analysis (active / passive, reverse-Oedipal, etc.) to be incredibly intriguing, my suspension of disbelief ultimately checked out once he got started on "Anal-Eroticism."
Disregarding the hundred years of psychoanalytic R&D that's taken place since this case was published, the believability of Freud's analysis here hinges on his supposed success in "curing" Sergei, because if, after all is said and done, the patient is freed of his neuroses, then it must be a direct result of the psychanalyst's techniques. Although Freud personally brings up a number of potential counterarguments to his analysis and subsequently deconstructs them, there is simply no logical way to convince someone that a child's neurosis stems from him having allegedly witnessed his parents in the act at the age of 18~ months; only a proof by demonstration (of the patient's having healed) could be effective.
The latter half of this book answers that very question: whether or not Freud was successful in his analysis of Sergei Pankejeff. The patient himself states in a footnote to his memoirs - responding to the author's letter asking for his opinion on this matter - that the issue is muddled, as the two biggest factors, it seemed, in his personal recovery were external: one being Freud's approval of his marriage to Therese, and the other Freud's filling of the paternal void that his late-father had left.
Ruth Mack Brunswick's analysis of Sergei in the years following his experience Freud paint for us the picture of a still-neurotic man, obsessed with an invisible nasal deformity and troubled by his former analyst's illness. She believes that Freud cleared the way for her with his analysis and conclusions, and that Sergei did come out of it more equipped to understand his problems even if they still took hold of him, but naturally the illusion one has after reading Freud's case study is that the Wolf-Man would live on as normal as anyone else, not fall into deeper illness.
Gardiner's concluding section illuminates everything that happened with Sergei in his old age, explaining her correspondences with him and how he changed over the decades. Her stance is that both Freud's and Brunswick's analyses were successful, that they allowed him to lead a "long and tolerably healthy life," though his years were by no means free of hardships.
It is important to note that the author didn't opt for a section on a more modern (for 1971 standards) analysis of the Wolf-Man. She mentioned briefly his uniform diagnoses of OCD from three different analysts across the previous fifteen years, and in a non-sequitur stated that she firmly rejects any diagnosis of psychosis in Sergei, but otherwise this book is principally about the Wolf-Man's own thoughts and their judgements by Freud and Brunswick. With that in mind I can't say that this has the fullest scope of the Wolf-Man case that it could have had. It has value as an introduction to Freud, and the scale of the author's collaboration with Sergei is admirable, but I'm not sure one could walk away from this book *understanding* more than they would have with a brief Wikipedia dive.
The memoirs, while mostly dry and lacking in focus, set up clearly the problem of the "Wolf-Man," after which Freud's interpretation can be read as the apparently brilliant solution to his conundrum. It's not unlike reading a detective novel, in which the author sets up a complex, winding plot and later unravels it via one character's genius.
Freud's analysis gets progressively more and more out-there the further he gets to the "heart" of Sergei's problems, and while I found the direct sexual analysis (active / passive, reverse-Oedipal, etc.) to be incredibly intriguing, my suspension of disbelief ultimately checked out once he got started on "Anal-Eroticism."
Disregarding the hundred years of psychoanalytic R&D that's taken place since this case was published, the believability of Freud's analysis here hinges on his supposed success in "curing" Sergei, because if, after all is said and done, the patient is freed of his neuroses, then it must be a direct result of the psychanalyst's techniques. Although Freud personally brings up a number of potential counterarguments to his analysis and subsequently deconstructs them, there is simply no logical way to convince someone that a child's neurosis stems from him having allegedly witnessed his parents in the act at the age of 18~ months; only a proof by demonstration (of the patient's having healed) could be effective.
The latter half of this book answers that very question: whether or not Freud was successful in his analysis of Sergei Pankejeff. The patient himself states in a footnote to his memoirs - responding to the author's letter asking for his opinion on this matter - that the issue is muddled, as the two biggest factors, it seemed, in his personal recovery were external: one being Freud's approval of his marriage to Therese, and the other Freud's filling of the paternal void that his late-father had left.
Ruth Mack Brunswick's analysis of Sergei in the years following his experience Freud paint for us the picture of a still-neurotic man, obsessed with an invisible nasal deformity and troubled by his former analyst's illness. She believes that Freud cleared the way for her with his analysis and conclusions, and that Sergei did come out of it more equipped to understand his problems even if they still took hold of him, but naturally the illusion one has after reading Freud's case study is that the Wolf-Man would live on as normal as anyone else, not fall into deeper illness.
Gardiner's concluding section illuminates everything that happened with Sergei in his old age, explaining her correspondences with him and how he changed over the decades. Her stance is that both Freud's and Brunswick's analyses were successful, that they allowed him to lead a "long and tolerably healthy life," though his years were by no means free of hardships.
It is important to note that the author didn't opt for a section on a more modern (for 1971 standards) analysis of the Wolf-Man. She mentioned briefly his uniform diagnoses of OCD from three different analysts across the previous fifteen years, and in a non-sequitur stated that she firmly rejects any diagnosis of psychosis in Sergei, but otherwise this book is principally about the Wolf-Man's own thoughts and their judgements by Freud and Brunswick. With that in mind I can't say that this has the fullest scope of the Wolf-Man case that it could have had. It has value as an introduction to Freud, and the scale of the author's collaboration with Sergei is admirable, but I'm not sure one could walk away from this book *understanding* more than they would have with a brief Wikipedia dive.
April 2, 2020
The Wolf Man's story, his autothanatography, the tale of his intricated life bound up with the secrets of fiction and the fictioning of a secret, could perhaps, in another life, another writing, have been titled Unconscious Mourning, or the Agonising Life of the Secret.
This collection, containing Pankeiev's memoirs, along with Freud's case study of the Wolf Man, "History of an Infantile Neurosis," Ruth Mack Brunswick's notes from her later analysis with Pankeiev, and Muriel Gardner's reflections on her friend's later life, offer what is more than a supplement to Freud's original case study. They reveal the fact that Freud's analysis of the Wolf Man, despite his consideration of it, was a failure (as was Mack Brunswick's later analysis). The Wolf Man was never "cured". Only death could "cure" him of this demand to be who he could not be; to be one who was not one, and certainly not "himself." The analyses of the Wolf Man uncovered, but did not decrypt, decode, the fundamental secret of the Wolf Man, of his life, and of his living death. He died, taking his secret to the grave; his lack of self thus entombed or encrypted in the crypt with his secret.
For more on this fascinating case, this life and its attendant death, I would direct one to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's exceptional work, The Wolf Man's Magic Word: a Cryptonymy. There the secret is decrypted, unwoven, and yet left to death, as secret. As it must be.
This collection, containing Pankeiev's memoirs, along with Freud's case study of the Wolf Man, "History of an Infantile Neurosis," Ruth Mack Brunswick's notes from her later analysis with Pankeiev, and Muriel Gardner's reflections on her friend's later life, offer what is more than a supplement to Freud's original case study. They reveal the fact that Freud's analysis of the Wolf Man, despite his consideration of it, was a failure (as was Mack Brunswick's later analysis). The Wolf Man was never "cured". Only death could "cure" him of this demand to be who he could not be; to be one who was not one, and certainly not "himself." The analyses of the Wolf Man uncovered, but did not decrypt, decode, the fundamental secret of the Wolf Man, of his life, and of his living death. He died, taking his secret to the grave; his lack of self thus entombed or encrypted in the crypt with his secret.
For more on this fascinating case, this life and its attendant death, I would direct one to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's exceptional work, The Wolf Man's Magic Word: a Cryptonymy. There the secret is decrypted, unwoven, and yet left to death, as secret. As it must be.
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December 8, 2020Scary.
August 7, 2025
freud says madness is an expression of the male fear of getting their genital cut off??
March 4, 2024
A find from the free book-sharing table («Gi en bok, ta en bok») outside Tøyen library.
Fun and interesting read, both from a historical and psychoanalytical perspective.
Fun and interesting read, both from a historical and psychoanalytical perspective.
July 17, 2008
Opened my eyes to some of the major concepts in psychoanalysis, but the patient clearly has a personality disorder which was looked at differently in the past.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews