Benutzer:Teichgräber/Sergei Pankejew

Sergei Konstantinovitch Pankejeff (Russisch: Сергей Константинович Панкеев) (24. Dezember 24, 1886 – 7. Mai, 1979) war ein russischer Adliger aus Odessa und wurde einer der bekanntesten Patienten Sigmund Freuds, der ihm den Namen der Wolfsmann gab, um seine Identität zu schützen, und zwar nach einem Traum von Pankejeff, wo er einen Baum voller weißer Wölfe gesehen hatte. [hide]

   * 1 Biography
   * 2 Der Wolfsmann
   * 3 Later life
   * 4 Criticism of Freud's interpretation
   * 5 Notes
   * 6 See also
   * 7 References
   * 8 External links

[edit] Biography

The Pankejeff family (note: this is Freud's German transliteration from the Russian; in English it would today be transliterated as Pankeyev) was a wealthy family in St. Petersburg. Sergei attended a grammar school in Russia but after the 1905 Russian Revolution he spent considerable time abroad studying. During his review of Freud's letters and other files, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson uncovered notes for an unpublished paper by Freud's associate Ruth Mack Brunswick. Freud asked her to review the Pankejeff case, and she discovered evidence that Pankejeff had been sexually abused by a family member during his childhood.[1]

In 1906, his older sister Anna committed suicide while visiting the site of Lermontov's fatal duel, and by 1907 Sergei began to show signs of serious depression himself. Sergei's father Konstantin also suffered from depression, often connected to specific political happenings of the day, and committed suicide in 1907 by consuming an excess of sleeping medication, a few months after Sergei had left for Munich to seek treatment for his own ailment. While in Munich, Pankejeff saw many doctors and stayed voluntarily at a number of elite psychiatric hospitals. In the summers he always visited Russia. [edit] Der Wolfsmann Prescription written by Sigmund Freud for the wife of Pankejeff, November 1919

In January 1910, Pankejeff's physician brought him to Vienna to have treatment with Freud. Pankejeff and Freud met with each other many times between February 1910 and July 1914, and a few times thereafter, including a brief psychoanalysis in 1919. Pankejeff's "nervous problems" included his inability to have bowel movements without the assistance of an enema, as well as debilitating depression. He also felt like there was a veil cutting him off from the world. Initially, according to Freud, Pankejeff resisted opening up to full analysis, until Freud gave him a year deadline for analysis, prompting Pankejeff to give up his resistances.

Freud's first publication on the "Wolf Man" was "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose), written at the end of 1914 but not published until 1918. Freud's treatment of Pankejeff centered around a dream the latter had as a very young child, and described to Freud as such:

   "I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. My nurse hurried to my bed, to see what had happened to me. It took quite a long while before I was convinced that it had only been a dream; I had had such a clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting on the tree. At last I grew quieter, felt as though I had escaped from some danger, and went to sleep again." (Freud 1918)

Freud's eventual analysis (along with Pankejeff's input) of the dream was that it was the result of Pankejeff having witnessed a "primal scene" — his parents having sex a tergo ("from behind" or "doggy style") — at a very young age. Later in the paper Freud posited the possibility that Pankejeff had instead witnessed copulation between animals, which was displaced to his parents.

Pankejeff's dream would play a major role in Freud's theory of psychosexual development, and along with Irma's injection (Freud's own dream, which launched dream analysis), it was one of the most important dreams for the developments of Freud's theories. Additionally, Pankejeff became the main case used by Freud to prove the validity of psychoanalysis. It was the first detailed case study not involving Freud analyzing himself which brought together the main aspects of catharsis, the unconscious, sexuality, and dream analysis put forward by Freud in his Studies on Hysteria (1895), The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), and his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905).