The Wolf Man’s Glückshaube : Rereading Sergei Pankejeff’s Memoir

One Book, Four Authors

The diverse cast of contributors to Gardiner’s The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud (1971a) allows us to view the complex web of relationships among them. As noted, the Wolf Man was first Freud’s analysand and then Mack Brunswick’s, and he kept up a friendly and somewhat therapeutic relationship with Gardiner throughout the years. Ruth Mack Brunswick (1897–1946) was an American doctor who came to Vienna in 1922 for an analysis and psychoanalytic training with Freud. During her analysis with Freud, the Wolf Man returned to him for help at a time of deep psychic turmoil. Freud offered him Mack Brunswick as a psychoanalyst and guided that analysis from a distance (Appignanesi and Forrester 1992, pp. 373–376; Mahony 1984, p. 140). Muriel Gardiner (1901–1985) was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who came to Vienna in 1926 to study medicine and seek analysis with Freud. Eventually she ended up in analysis not with Freud but with Mack Brunswick. The analysis lasted a couple of years, during which she completed psychoanalytic training (Appignanesi and Forrester 1992, pp. 376–378). During that time and up until the Nazi occupation, Gardiner took an active role in the Socialist underground in Vienna and in arranging visas for Jews to find safe refuge outside Nazi territory. ¹ Thus, in the late 1920s the Wolf Man and Gardiner were in analysis with Mack Brunswick in Vienna at the same time. In fact, Gardiner first encountered the Wolf Man when Mack Brunswick recommended him to her as a Russian language teacher.

The real identity of the famous yet anonymous Wolf Man was revealed only after his death in 1979. Though his biography is now quite well known, I will briefly summarize it before turning to the comparative reading of the texts concerning his life. His name was Sergei Constantinovich Pankejeff. Born in 1887 to an aristocratic Russian family, he was raised in great wealth. In his childhood, his parents would travel abroad for long periods, and the figures closest to him were his older sister Anna and their nanny, Nanya, a loyal and caring mother-figure to the young Pankejeff. Anna’s life ended tragically in her youth, when she committed suicide while traveling abroad. Grief-stricken, Pankejeff dropped his legal studies and was thrown into a deep depression. (Freud’s case study cites a gonorrheal infection occurring some months before Anna’s death as the primary trigger for the depression; Pankejeff’s memoir does not mention the infection.) During the years that followed, Pankejeff traveled through Europe with a private doctor and committed himself to various sanatoriums. In one of them, he fell passionately in love with a nurse, Therese, who worked there. The vicissitudes of his relationship with her, alongside his depression, led him to seek further psychiatric help. In February 1910 he arrived in Vienna to meet Freud and immediately began a six-session-a-week analysis that lasted four and a half years. This analysis ended in July 1914, at the outset of World War I, when Pankejeff returned to Russia and fulfilled his longtime goal of marrying Therese, a plan he had deferred until the end of the analysis. In 1919, at the end of the war, Pankejeff traveled westward again and came to visit Freud, who gave him a copy of the case study he had written about him. When Pankejeff told him about the return of the digestive symptoms he had suffered in the past, Freud suggested further analysis. Pankejeff agreed, but the course of analysis was interrupted by the aftermath of the Russian revolution, which brought about a dramatic change of circumstances for Pankejeff: a descendant of aristocrats, he found himself destitute and his homeland dangerous. Overnight, he went from being a wealthy aristocrat to being an impoverished emigré. In the years that followed, he received financial support from Freud, and gradually built a life as an insurance agent. He ended up spending most of his life in Vienna, and is buried there. Thus, the symbolic homeland he had been offered by psychoanalysis became his actual home. In the mid-1920s, Pankejeff suffered another severe crisis, which included hypochondriacal symptoms with delusional characteristics. He naturally turned to his former analyst, but Freud, as we have seen, referred him to Mack Brunswick. His analysis with her lasted a couple of months and did not, according to Pankejeff, leave any significant mark on him (Obholzer 1980, pp. 55–57, 131–132). Nineteen-thirty-eight was another fateful year in his life, as his beloved Therese committed suicide. Pankejeff, who had not foreseen this, was stricken with grief and despair.

As noted, Pankejeff drew attention from the psychoanalytic community for decades. Psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and journalists initiated meetings with him for various purposes: personality evaluations, psychotherapy, and short-term psychoanalysis and interviews. At some point in his life, the Freud archive in New York decided to give Pankejeff a monthly pension. For a time, the head of the archive, Kurt Eissler (1908–1999), would come to Vienna for a month every year to offer Pankejeff tape-recorded psychoanalytic sessions. Eissler also sent reproductions of Pankejeff’s paintings of the famous wolf dream, presented in Freud’s case study, to psychoanalytic conferences for sale. It was Gardiner who suggested that he write his memoirs as the Wolf Man. In addition, a series of interviews by the journalist Karin Obholzer with Pankejeff in the last years of his life was published after his death (Obholzer 1980). These imterviews, which were recorded, followed his gradual physical, mental, and psychological deterioration until his death, at the age of ninety-two, in a psychiatric institution.

Lifting the Veil

An essential component of Freud’s case study is the dramatic construction of the primal scene the patient allegedly experienced when he was an infant of eighteen months. The construction of the scene was enabled by the interpretation of the wolf dream Pankejeff reported having when he was four, a dream that Freud believed gave insight into the sexual content of the primal scene in Nachträglichkeit. In this construction, the act of lifting the veil is given pivotal importance. First, the dream is distinctly static, and it is notable that the only event is the sudden and mysterious movement of the veil, represented by the window. As Pankejeff described it, “The only piece of action in the dream was the opening of the window; for the wolves sat quite still and without making any movement on the branches of the tree, to the right and left of the trunk, and looked at me. It seemed as though they had riveted their whole attention upon me” (Freud 1918, p. 18). The dominant gaze of the wolves toward the child dreamer strikes his attention, and he responds with an observant gaze of his own: “the strained attention with which they all looked at him. The lasting sense of reality.” Freud concludes, “It can naturally only be a question of the reality of something unknown” (p. 21).

Before the window opened, by some mysterious force, the child was lying in his bed at night, submitting passively to his unconscious. At some point, according to Freud, the patient is intrigued by this movement of the window and declares, “My eyes suddenly opened” (p. 34). The child’s gaze in the dream is an inevitable consequence of the veil’s being removed and is understood as a repetition of the infantile gaze at the primal scene, which is recaptured in the dream with its traumatic and vivid quality. The child finds himself looking, and thereby against his will becomes an active witness and interpreter of these erotically charged scenes, in a complex scopophilia. At the same time, the fantasy of returning to a protected sphere is created.

A pivotal expression of the veil in Pankejeff’s adult life appears toward the end of the case study, where Freud reveals a symptom of which Pankejeff always complained. The symptom was that of constantly seeing or feeling a veil before his eyes: “The world, he said, was hidden from him by a veil; and our psycho-analytic training forbids our assuming that these words can have been without significance or have been chosen at haphazard” (p. 99). The prolonged quest for the meaning of this rather peculiar symptom in analysis was fruitless until, toward the termination of the treatment, its possible meaning was suddenly revealed: “It was not until the end, just before taking leave of the treatment, that he remembered having been told that he was born in a caul [Glückshaube]. He had for that reason always looked on himself as a special child of fortune whom no ill could befall” (p. 99). Freud offers the following interpretation: “Thus the caul was the veil which hid him from the world and hid the world from him. The complaint that he made was in reality a fulfilled wishful phantasy: it exhibited him as back once more in the womb, and was, in fact, a wishful phantasy of flight from the world. It can be translated as follows: ‘Life makes me so unhappy! I must get back into the womb!’” (p. 100). ²

I want to further develop the interpretation offered by Freud of the Glückshaube, the promise it holds, and the traumatic experience of being delivered prematurely into reality. Embryonic life in the caul serves as a metaphor for a timeless form of being intact within an internal world, while delivery ushers the infant into the external realm of time and the senses. The caesura of birth carries with it an ambivalent experience, on the one hand a desire for the sensual arousal of the external world and on the other a craving to regress into the protected realm of the caul. The veil, as Blum (1974) and Greenacre (1973) observe, presents the conflict between the wish to see and the temptation of blinding denial. Pankejeff’s borderline personality, as Blum suggests, implies a continuous threat that he experienced beginning in early childhood with regard to his sense of reality and intolerance for frustration, accompanied by an intense symbiotic fantasy of “intrauterine escape to the safety of fusion with his mother” (p. 730). The dialectic between the internal and the external turned, in Pankejeff’s case, into a neurotic symptom of feeling caught behind a veil, as a repetition of the conflict evolving around the experience of being prematurely torn from the quiet serenity of the womb.

Pankejeff’s passive longings for care and nurturance and his experience of unmet dependency needs are expressed not only through the neurotic symptom of the veil in front of his eyes but also in his immediate attachment to analysis and Freud’s consulting room. Pankejeff had a strong transference to the physicality of Freud’s office setting, which he apparently experienced as a concretization of care and attention. Later on, he felt barred from this place of balm and refuge in a way that repeated earlier traumatic losses. In contrast with this immediate attachment to analysis that Pankejeff presents, Freud, in the case study, emphasizes his patient’s rigid resistances, which led Freud to the harsh decision of forced termination: “The patient with whom I am here concerned remained for a long time unassailably entrenched behind an attitude of obliging apathy. He listened, understood, and remained unapproachable” (Freud 1918, p. 11). In Pankejeff’s reminiscences, by contrast, an immediate and potent attachment to the analytic setting is described: “After the first few hours with Freud, I felt that I had at last found what I had so long been seeking. It was a revelation to me to hear the fundamental concepts of a completely new science of the human psyche, from the mouth of its founder. . . . I perceived at once that Freud had succeeded in discovering an unexplored region of the human soul, and that if I could follow him along this path, a new world would open to me” (Pankejeff 1971b, p. 138). Pankejeff’s vivid reminiscences of Freud’s consulting room emphasize this place as a protected sphere, which implicitly relates to embryonic experience: “I can remember, as though I saw them today, his two adjoining studies, with the door open between them and with their windows opening on a little courtyard. There was always a feeling of sacred peace and quiet there. . . . Everything here contributed to one’s feeling of leaving the haste of modern life behind, of being sheltered from one’s daily cares” (p. 139).

Further investigation into the meaning of the veil led me to the idea of the truth in the veil, which appears in Walter Benjamin’s work. In “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” Benjamin (1925) raises essential questions about literature and literary criticism. Beyond his investigation into the plot and characters of the literary text, Benjamin stresses that the reader should be continuously aware that truth appears solely beyond the veil of concealment and disguise, in the spectrum of semblance: “Beauty is not a semblance, not a veil covering something else. It itself is not appearance but purely essence—one which, of course, remains essentially identical to itself only when veiled. Therefore, even if everywhere else semblance is deception, the beautiful semblance is the veil thrown over that which is necessarily most veiled. For the beautiful is neither the veil nor the veiled object but rather the object in its veil. . . . Thus, in the face of everything beautiful, the idea of unveiling becomes that of the impossibility of unveiling” (p. 351). The truth or beauty that lies in the text can never be revealed in its wholeness but only through obscurity, through the veil of semblance. Moreover, truth cannot be revealed by itself, and thus the process of unveiling remains a fantasy of grasping truth as an absolute. Truth can be grasped only through a veil, for it is merely embodied in the mysterious unity of the veil and the veiled.

Pankejeff alludes to the obscurity of truth as a unity of the veiled and the veil, in a complex dialectic of revealing and concealing. The heart of his memoirs consists not of recollections from his analysis but of a broad account his life story, an independent autobiographical narrative that holds but little resemblance to the narrative offered by Freud in the case study. This difference is indeed striking and stands as a central aspect of Pankejeff’s veiling process. Gardiner’s edited volume was promoted as the Wolf Man’s memoirs, thereby disclaiming it as psychoanalytic literature. Yet a reading of Pankejeff’s autobiographical essay (1971a) reveals the surprising fact that his psychoanalysis and his relationship with Freud are omitted from the text. The analysis is briefly mentioned, but only as the reason for his long stay in Vienna before his marriage, and Freud’s case study is given no more than a single dry remark. Pankejeff (1971b) did write a separate essay dedicated to his recollections of Freud, two decades before Gardiner’s volume was published, and the chapter is included in the volume, but even this chapter, dedicated to his analysis, in many ways omits more than it reveals. In this text, Pankejeff focuses on his impressions of Freud the man and the analytic setting he offered but completely omits any view of his own of the process or the line of interpretation so emphasized by Freud in the case study. Although Pankejeff wrote his memoir as a continuation of his reminiscences of Freud, and was aware that the two texts would be published alongside the case study, this omission creates an odd reading experience, as if we were reading the memoir of some anonymous Russian emigré with artistic aspirations. The omission of psychoanalysis from the memoir is especially striking given that Pankejeff lived his adult life in the light (and shadow) of the famous persona of Freud’s analysand.

But it is not only the analysis and Freud’s case study that are absent from the memoir. Pankejeff’s early development and infantile sexuality, the very core of Freud’s text, are completely absent also. The memoir gives no attention to the author’s sexual life, neither in childhood nor in adulthood. It also ignores the complex matrix of symptoms that accompanied Pankejeff from childhood to old age, and which are described in detail in Freud’s and Mack Brunswick’s case studies (Mahony 1984, pp. 11–12). Another important difference between the texts lies in the contrast between which life stages each of the texts foregrounds. In the case study, Freud declares his intention to focus almost solely on the patient’s psychic development in childhood, as constructed and interpreted in analysis. The subject that is brought out most saliently is the impact of the patient’s infantile sexuality. By contrast, Pankejeff’s memoir focuses on the theme of mourning, offered as a lifelong thread that begins with his sister’s suicide as he is on the verge of adult life, represented as “unconscious mourning,” and repeated traumatically in his wife’s suicide many years later (Buirski and Haglund 1998). Pankejeff wrote of his childhood only after strong persuasion by Gardiner (1971b, pp. 345–357). He refused to write a more detailed recollection of his long analysis before and after the war. He also makes no mention of the severe crisis he suffered in the 1920s or of the vicissitudes of his relationship with Freud, including Freud’s financial support, his refusal to take him on for another analysis, the referral to Mack Brunswick, and the later disconnection from him. Pankejeff’s memoir does not explicitly mention Freud’s immigration to London or his death, even though it is known that Pankejeff took great pains to get to London during the Nazi occupation of Austria and to meet Mack Brunswick there. He surely knew that Mack Brunswick had gone to London to see Freud for further analytic sessions. And yet, even though Freud’s death in September 1939 is not mentioned, the memoir symbolically and somewhat mysteriously ends there (Pankejeff 1971a, p. 129). ³ Mack Brunswick reports that the two men drifted apart and provides her explanation that Pankejeff found it difficult to witness Freud’s illness, and that he was hurt by the rejection he experienced (Mack Brunswick 1971, pp. 283, 304).

The complexity of the unveiling of truth finds further expression in Mack Brunswick’s case study. This rather neglected text is remarkable for the complex matrix of transference-countertransference ties it reveals, for Freud was the analyst of both analysand and analyst, of both Mack Brunswick and Pankejeff. Mack Brunswick finds herself in a complex situation at the very outset of the analysis: she discovers that her patient has been financially dishonest with his former analyst and dishonest with her, his current analyst, regarding his symptoms (Mack Brunswick 1971, pp. 279–280). Mack Brunswick’s text expresses her struggle, as an analyst, with two complex transference relationships: her countertransference as analyst toward her patient and her transference toward their mutual analyst, Freud. Most of all, Mack Brunswick resists understanding the patient’s “peculiarities” as part of his obscure nature, which is how Freud had characterized them, and insists instead that they are conscious dishonesties. She finds herself troubled by her analysand’s ambivalent stance toward Freud, which “contained an astounding mixture of fantasy and fact,” and decides to stimulate a negative transference by “a concentrated attempt to undermine the patient’s idea of himself as the favorite son” (p. 284). Explicitly, Mack Brunswick’s text reflects a determined stance of unveiling the truth, yet bearing in mind the truth behind the veil, we may well ask whether her emphasis on her patient’s dishonesties prevented her from seeing other aspects of his personality and of the distinct analytic triad formed in this case.

It cannot simply be overlooked that in a volume dedicated to his identity as the famous Wolf Man, Pankejeff created a memoir so distinct from Freud’s canonical case study. I suggest that his creating an autobiographical text that deliberately avoids telling his story as Freud’s analysand, as might have been expected, should be regarded as a submerged statement, meant to raise questions in the reader. The author-analysand is thus drawing a veil over his story.

A Reinterpretation of the Case Study

The case study written by Freud opens with a literary decision: “Only this infantile neurosis will be the subject of my communication.” The case study focuses almost solely on the patient’s childhood and, even more specifically, on his infantile neurosis. Freud made this choice “in spite of the patient’s direct request,” which was to give expression to “a complete history of his illness, of his treatment, and of his recovery.” Freud justifies his decision with the claim that “I recognized that such a task was technically impracticable and socially impermissible” (Freud 1918, p. 8). Moreover, Freud states that he is telling the story of a difficult analysis, which “is characterized by a number of peculiarities,” the analysis of a complex patient, “a young man whose health had broken down in his eighteenth year after a gonorrheal infection, and who was entirely incapacitated and completely dependent upon other people” (p. 7). Freud reports that the patient was classified “in the most authoritative quarters as a case of ‘manic-depressive insanity’” (p. 8). Freud, however, disagrees with these authorities and constructs an alternative diagnosis, one that centers on the archaic history of the individual: “I have formed the opinion that this case, like many others which clinical psychiatry has labelled with the most multifarious and shifting diagnoses, is to be regarded as a condition following on an obsessional neurosis which has come to an end spontaneously, but has left a defect behind it after recovery” (p. 8). This neurosis is the infantile neurosis, and Freud’s text expresses the quest for this lost narrative of this illness and its roots and implications. The desired effect Freud wants to create in his text is of psychoanalysis mainly as a process of lifting the veil, unraveling repressed memories that continue to trouble the analysand’s psyche.

The narrative offered by Freud is brought to a climax in the famous reconstruction of the primal scene the patient had allegedly witnessed in infancy. This is the first time Freud discusses the psychic meaning of the primal scene as an actual experience and as a phylogenetic construct. The problem in this case was that the dramatic and intensely passionate construct of the primal scene had never been transformed into a live recollection in the analysand’s consciousness. Freud here proposes the idea of the past receiving a new translation in Nachträglichkeit; the connection between past and present is by no means a simple one. Vast rhetorical efforts are made in the case study to present the construct of the primal scene as an inevitable interpretation of an actual or symbolic event, in which the present is not only transformed deterministically by the past, but the past is transformed and translated hermeneutically by the present. This dynamic translation is offered as an ongoing process of transformation and enrichment of meaning (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967, pp. 111–114).

Freud continued to be troubled by the inability of psychoanalysis to transform psychoanalytic constructs into live recollections, presenting this as a crucial problem at the outset of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). He explains the necessity for new theoretical constructs: “At first the analyzing physician could do no more than discover the unconscious material that was concealed from the patient, put it together, and, at the right moment, communicate it to him. Psychoanalysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting.” This kind of work did not bring the expected therapeutic results, for the analyst found himself trying “to oblige the patient to confirm the analyst’s construction from his own memory. In that endeavor the chief emphasis lay upon the patient’s resistances . . . this was where suggestion operating as ‘transference’ played its part” (p. 18). The case study of the Wolf Man is based on this initial phase in the analytic work, where the primal scene is constructed from a dream interpretation and the analyst tries to encourage the patient to form a live connection to this construct by linking it to his personal narrative.

Pankejeff’s memoir both connects to the case study through intertextual allusions and pushes away from its dominance and conclusiveness; the question of its ability to reveal the truth thereby continues. The childhood dream and the reconstruction of the primal scene are of course not mentioned in the memoir. In a communication late in his life, he admitted never having been able to identify with the narrative of infantile sexuality or accept it as part of his personal narrative. This was especially true for the memory of the primal scene and its reconstruction on the basis of the wolf dream. He saw Freud’s dream interpretation as “terribly farfetched” and continued by saying, “That scene in the dream where the windows open and so on and the wolves are sitting there, and his interpretation, I don’t know, those things are miles apart” (Obholzer 1980, p. 35). He concludes this bitter commentary by saying that “that primal scene is no more than a construct” (p. 36).

In contrast to the narrative of the Wolf Man’s childhood presented by Freud, centering on the wolf dream at the age of four, Pankejeff presents an alternative transformative event at that age, which is the revelation of his love of music and the destruction of that love. The four-year-old Pankejeff received a little accordion and found himself “literally in love with it.” He describes the intense desire for music that he experienced: “It was winter, and when darkness fell I sometimes went to a room where I would be undisturbed and where I thought nobody would hear me, and began to improvise. I imagined a lonely winter landscape with a sleigh drawn by a horse toiling through the snow. I tried to produce the sounds on my accordion which would match the mood of this fantasy” (Pankejeff 1971a, p. 10). Thus, an alternative possibility of psychic development is created here in the potential space between reality and imagination, and between sensuality and the protected sphere. Even though that growth was soon afterward disturbed and exploited by adult impingement, expressed by the father’s insistence that the boy present his talent, music had been revealed as an experience of being immersed in beauty constructed of the veil and veiled rather than grasping a finite truth. Pankejeff never returned to playing music after this early experience, yet his affinity with art continued. In his childhood recollections, he describes becoming an eager reader at adolescence, and later an eager painter (Pankejeff 1971a, p. 20; Weissberg 2012, pp. 175–181).

The avoidance of any explicit reference to Freud’s case study continues with Pankejeff’s decision to offer a different life story in his memoir and to give central meaning to entirely different events. In the essay dedicated to his recollections of Freud, Pankejeff opens with a description of “the desolate situation in which a neurotic found himself at that period before psychoanalysis.” For him, the center of neurotic psychic pain is the melancholic search for an unknown internal object. He states that the neurotic “has come into conflict with his environment and then lost contact with it. . . . His goal is not a real known object, but rather some other object, hidden in his unconscious, unknown to himself” (Pankejeff 1971b, p. 135). Whereas the case study centers on childhood history and the development of infantile sexuality, Pankejeff’s memoir forms a narrative of loss and of a person for whom the experience of loss gradually became his only certainty. On the sociocultural level, it tells a story of the absolute and complete loss of homeland and culture. The aristocratic Russian society in which Pankejeff was raised is described early in the memoir, only to be ruined and vanish as the memoir continues. On the personal level, the memoir centers on the death of those closest to Pankejeff, most of all the tragic death of his sister Anna in his youth and his wife Therese in his adulthood. Pankejeff draws a thread of grief between these two losses and with it he forms his life narrative. All other events are presented as minor shadows in the light of these deep and intensely melancholic experiences.

In retrospect, Pankejeff situates his sister’s suicidal act as a turning point in his life sequence, for it is presented après coup as a prefiguration of his wife’s suicide some three decades later. The resemblance between the two events hints at a fateful connection between them. Both involve the sudden death of a beloved woman who tragically takes her life, leaving him shocked, bewildered, and detached. On the early loss of his sister, Pankejeff writes,

After the death of Anna, with whom I had had a very deep, personal, inner relationship, and whom I had always considered as my only comrade, I fell into a state of deepest depression. The mental agony I now suffered would often increase to the intensity of physical pain. . . . I had fallen into such a state of melancholy after Anna’s death that there seemed to be no sense or purpose in living, and nothing in the world seemed worth striving for [1971a, pp. 25–26].

This retrospective point of view on his state of mind after the death of his sister and the emphasis on his despair implicitly allude to Freud’s case study, where Freud emphasizes his patient’s lack of any emotion at the loss: “When the news of his sister’s death arrived, so the patient told me, he felt hardly a trace of grief. He had to force himself to show signs of sorrow, and was able quite coolly to rejoice at having now become the sole heir to the property” (Freud 1918, p. 23). This sharp distinction between the two narratives of Pankejeff’s response to Anna’s death serves as another expression of the unity of the veil and the veiled. The distinction cannot be resolved simply by choosing one narrative over the other, as the correct representation of a finite truth. The truth lies between various emotional responses, expressions of these responses, interpretations and translations of these responses après coup, and narratives the authors choose to present. Freud saw Pankejeff’s response to his sexual illness (the gonorrheal infection) as being more profound than his grief over the loss of his sister. Freud’s failure to recognize his patient’s sorrow stems from the psychoanalytic claim that Pankejeff’s pathology was profoundly influenced by his early psychosexual development. Pankejeff’s emphasis on his mourning is, among other things, his way of offering an alternative to the famous narrative offered by Freud. Thus, the obscure theme of mutual exploitation is so deeply entangled in the two narratives that Pankejeff’s mourning remains a veiled mystery.

The description in Pankejeff’s memoir of the loss of his wife three decades after the loss of his sister is intense and fragmented: “I lived this day and the following ones as though in a state of delirium in which one does not know whether what happens is reality or a dreadful dream. . . . The question kept hammering away in my mind: how could Therese do this to me? And as she was the only stable structure in my changeable life, how could I, now suddenly deprived of her, live on? It seemed to me impossible” (Pankejeff 1971a, pp. 121–122). Pankejeff’s text reveals a certain recovery after each of his losses with the exception of Therese’s death in 1938, which left him in a desolate and fragile condition. His reading of the letters Therese left before taking her life stresses the agonizing guilt he felt for not having noticed her despair (pp. 122–124).

Their suicidal acts and sudden and tragic deaths are not the only links that tie together the two women in Pankejeff’s life. But the erotic aspect of his relationship with Anna, which is accorded a central place in the case study, is entirely absent from Pankejeff’s memoir. During analysis, Pankejeff had a group of dreams that “were concerned with aggressive actions on the boy’s part against his sister or against the governess and with energetic reproofs and punishments on account of them. It was as though . . . after her bath . . . he had tried . . . to undress his sister . . . to tear off her coverings . . . or veils—and so on” (Freud 1918, p. 19; ellipses in original). Subsequently, the case study reveals that the patient gradually recalled childhood memories of his sister: “his sister had seduced him into sexual practices. First came a recollection that in the lavatory, which the children used frequently to visit together, she had made this proposal: ‘Let’s show our bottoms,’ and had proceeded from words to deeds. . . . His sister had taken hold of his penis and played with it, at the same time telling him incomprehensible stories about the Nanya, as though by way of explanation. His Nanya, she said, used to do the same thing with all kinds of people.” The fantasies that appeared in the dreams during analysis were therefore understood by Freud as a compensation for the sister’s active sexual role, which “seemed offensive to the patient’s masculine self-esteem” (p. 20). ⁴ For Freud this childhood seduction was pivotal in understanding Pankejeff’s childhood and adulthood neurosis. Pankejeff’s memoir, by contrast, while it gives Anna’s tragedy a central place in his life, emphatically omits the sexual aspects of their relationship. ⁵

Yet this pivotal theme is not actually absent from the memoir, but rather is presented as truth as the veiled and the veil. In the dream brought to analysis, Pankejeff’s infantile desire for Anna pushes him to tear off her veils, but in the memoir this desire is given a melancholic translation through the moment of separation from her. The separation from Anna reveals the image of her coffin being lowered into the family tomb in the Old Cemetery in Odessa: “Just as the coffin was being lowered into the grave, the sun, already low on the horizon, sank, its last rays piercing the foliage and flooding the shining metal casket” (Pankejeff 1971a, p. 24). The sun on his sister’s casket might have a blinding, veiling effect, implying a question about what cannot be seen directly, but only through a veil. Three decades later, by contrast, in a Viennese cemetery chapel after the death of his beloved Therese, the author does not settle for a glance at the coffin from a distance. His sister’s body must remain hidden, yet he responds positively to the suggestion given to him to open his wife’s coffin. He approaches the casket and looks at his dead wife: “The gas had had the effect of giving Therese’s face an unusual freshness; her cheeks were a delicate rose. In her coffin she looked like a very young woman who had peacefully fallen asleep” (p. 122).

In contrast to the untimely deaths of his sister and his wife, Pankejeff’s mother died of old age. After Therese’s death, she had come to live with her son in Vienna. In a letter addressed to Muriel Gardiner, Pankejeff writes: “Although my mother’s condition caused so many real difficult problems, and although her life was no longer anything but suffering, still her passing has left great emptiness in me. . . . I believe that my mother, at the last moment, experienced death as a deliverance, for I looked at her in her coffin and could scarcely believe that death could make a human face so beautiful. For I have never before seen my mother looking so sublimely quiet and peaceful, yes, almost of classic beauty” (Pankejeff, May 12, 1953, in Gardiner 1971b, p. 340).

I suggest that the obscure image of Anna’s dead body lying inside the closed coffin serves as a prefiguration of the explicit image of the dead Therese and the dead mother. Pankejeff’s implied gaze on Anna alludes to the erotic aspect of their relationship. It is given metonymic expression through the sun’s last rays, setting on the coffin before it reaches its final destination. The dead Therese’s image is emphasized, almost ironically, by her liveliness and freshness, although in reality she was already in middle age. These characteristics, along with the name Therese and the location of the scene in the chapel, present the figure of the lover as a saint, for she fulfills her beauty spiritually and symbolically, more than in an erotic way. Pankejeff’s mother died about fifteen years after his wife, and four and a half decades after his sister. Her beauty, as revealed in her dead body, represents the return of the repressed in the most classic form; hence her image as being of “classical beauty” alludes to the passionate love for the mother in the oedipal stage and its intensity based on the archaic longing for her in infancy (Freud 1914, pp. 87–88). Death endows the mother with the gift of beauty, and her face is described as glowing. Pankejeff’s longing and admiring gaze on her body restores to her a lost liveliness and beauty, as he himself, by this same gaze, restores his lost innocence and vitality. The son’s late gaze on his mother is also, dialectically, that of an old and desperate son on his tired mother. The beauty of the three dead women appears not as semblance but as truth through a veil, what Benjamin says is the only way that truth can be grasped. For, as Benjamin (1925) writes, beauty involves the inseparable unity of the object in its veil. “For the sake of that unity, which veil and veiled compose in it, beauty can essentially be valid only where the duality of nakedness and veiling does not yet obtain: in art and in the appearances of mere nature” (p. 351). About one of his depressions, Pankejeff writes, “Like crashing waves, then, come fits of despair, in which life seems horribly ugly, and redeeming death seems beautiful” (September 9, 1950, in Gardiner 1971b, p. 339).

Each of the three losses occurs at the outset of a new period in the author’s life and serves as a prefiguration of losses yet to come. The death of the sister occurs at the outset of youth, the death of the wife at the outset of middle age, and the death of the mother at the outset of old age. Death is presented as a persistent companion, an intimate and vital presence. Through the images of feminine death, crossing the threshold from living to dying is presented not as a final separation but as a way to revive the past. This idea obscurely alludes to Freud’s discussion, in “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (1913), of the connection between passion for a woman and death. Weaving the sister, the wife, and the mother together in Pankejeff’s writing reveals the oedipal thread that is otherwise omitted. The powerful images of the dead women imply forbidden passion and the early seduction by the sister, all of which are omitted from the memoir. Although he loved Therese, his marriage was characterized by continuous infidelities on his part, usually with prostitutes. Her suffering over his misbehavior was an additional source of guilt for him after her death.

Sexuality is linked from its very beginning to guilt and loss for Pankejeff. First of all, his mother is described mainly as absent, primarily because her hypochondria did not leave her much time for her family. Only her children’s illness drew her to them, as “an exemplary nurse. . . . I can remember that as a child I sometimes wished I could get sick, to be able to enjoy my mother’s being with me and looking after me” (Pankejeff 1971a, p. 9). The absent mother was replaced by another devoted maternal figure, Nanya. But he recalls that he understood that the latter’s dedication to the child Pankejeff was deeply related to mourning: “My Nanya was a peasant woman from the period when there was still serfdom. She was a completely honest and devoted soul, with a heart of gold. In her youth she had been married, but her son had died as an infant. So she had apparently transferred all her mother love from this dead son to me” (p. 8). The substitute for the absent mother finds her way to a substitute for the dead son. The relationship received a further libidinal cathexis from the sister’s fantasies about Nanya’s sexual encounters, mentioned in the case study.

Termination From an Interminable Analysis

In the wolf dream, as a consequence of the veil’s being lifted, the subject’s eyes are opened to an active gaze. In addition, the wolves’ eyes are suddenly and dominantly fixed upon him. Freud, in his construction of the primal scene through the dream, offers an interpretation of the image of the gaze on the dreamer: “They were looking at him with strained attention. This feature comes entirely from the primal scene, and has got into the dream at the price of being turned completely round” (Freud 1918, p. 42n). Freud concludes that the image in the dream of the gaze of the other is an expression of the defense mechanism of reversal. But this line of interpretation may also protect Freud from acknowledging the effect his own gaze and expectations as analyst had on his patient. By this, I am referring mainly to the fixed termination that Freud imposed on Pankejeff’s analysis, and the vicissitudes of that termination.

In the chapter dedicated to his analysis with Freud, Pankejeff presents it as a transformative experience and Freud as having opened the door to a magical world. The forced termination that Freud set to the analysis, however, and the analysand’s cooperation with that, prevented Pankejeff from undergoing the necessary mourning process. Though Freud had announced a year in advance the date he had set for the termination, the fact that the date was determined by the analyst, and that the analyst gave it a unilaterally positive interpretation, made it impossible for the patient to work through his negative feelings about it. Those feelings were given a metonymic expression in the memoir through the burial ceremony of the Austrian archduke and his wife (Tzur Mahalel 2017).

Freud continued to doubt the analytic technique of forced termination for many years thereafter, suggesting that this therapeutic decision had much more complex implications than he had suggested in the case study. In “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” written many years later, Freud (1937) offers thoughts on the Wolf Man’s troubles in later years in relation to the assumptions Freud had had about him as a patient. This examination of the changes in his patient’s state through the years draws parallels with the changes in his analytic stance: “When he left me in the midsummer of 1914, with as little suspicion as the rest of us of what lay so shortly ahead, I believed that his cure was radical and permanent” (p. 217). Concerning the case study, Freud writes in retrospect about the ambiguity that remains surrounding the question of the Wolf Man’s analysis and psychic cure, concluding that “I have found the history of this patient’s recovery scarcely less interesting than that of his illness” (p. 218).

Any discussion of Pankejeff’s recovery should indeed be challenged by the great losses and psychic pain he experienced over the course of his life. His birth in a caul gave him the promise of good luck and prosperity, and psychoanalysis gave him the promise of psychic cure and fame as a literary protagonist. The memoir that he wrote suggests, in retrospect, a narrative of having had the protective veil prematurely lifted in multiple contexts: the womb at birth, innocence in childhood, the family’s wealth, the psychoanalytic setting, and marriage. As the veil was removed, he was forced to suddenly open his eyes and face death, incest, abandonment, guilt, penury, and loss. The other’s gaze at him is questioned with respect to its potential for nourishment and growth alongside destruction and abuse. Pankejeff debates the value psychoanalysis had for him, invoking the theme of free will:

Freud said that even when the repressed becomes conscious, and when an analysis could be regarded as successful, this does not automatically bring about the patient’s recovery. After such an analysis, the patient has been placed in a position in which he can get well; before analysis this was not possible. But whether or not he really will get well depends on his wish to recover, on his will. Freud compared this situation with the purchase of a travel ticket. This ticket only makes the journey possible; it does not take its place. But what is this will to recover, really? And what determines it? [1971b, p. 148].

The image of the train ticket continued to occupy Pankejeff, and he later expressed his protest more bluntly: “If it is true that everything originates in childhood and that, when everything is remembered, the illness disappears, it must disappear. And one cannot say that the patient is then free to choose. There’s a certain contradiction here” (quoted in Obholzer 1980, p. 43). Psychoanalysis gave him a home, but only a temporary home, perhaps as ephemeral as every home, veil, or womb offered to him. ⁶

Pankejeff’s text can be seen as playing the fort/da game with Freud’s case study (Tzur Mahalel 2018). The memoir connects to the case study both through obscure intertextual allusions and, mainly, through its implicit promise to tell the story not of Pankejeff the man but of Freud’s famous analysand. The Wolf Man’s intention of claiming authorial subjectivity, in the face of his feeling dispossessed by Freud and his text, is understood in the context of what was in fact interminable analysis. Freud’s text is a deliberate effort to lift the veil, both for the analysand and for a universe of readers Freud hoped to persuade. Yet this psychoanalytic and literary tour de force is successful only in part, for the truth, as a finite entity, partakes of a constant dynamic of appearance and disappearance in Freud’s text, as it is woven into and untethered from the narrative (Laplanche 1992, pp. 147–157; Mahony 1984). Pankejeff’s text is also engaged in a game of fort/da with Freud and Freud’s text. Freud is implicitly depicted as a wolf, intently staring at the analysand, fixing the analysand’s narrative through his interpretations and his writing. The analysand’s memoir, by contrast, lifts and then replaces the veil, bringing forth the intriguing notion that truth is better apprehended from beyond the veil. Within the memoir, which was written and published because of the vast contribution that psychoanalysis had made to Pankejeff’s life and because of his debt to it, there are troubling implications of exploitation and impossible mourning. These themes are re-created in the way the author turns to the reader with the explicit promise of telling the analysand’s (true) story, yet actually plays a game with the reader, repeating his archaic entanglement of temptation and abuse. The author does not explicitly articulate this complexity, yet this obscure dynamic finds its way into the melancholic narrative offered in the memoir and is intertwined with the theme of the veil and the question of truth.

Freud’s and Pankejeff’s texts can be understood as a mutual attempt to decipher each other’s hidden truth, albeit within the context of their differing degrees of power and authority. In the case study, Freud confronts the patient’s powerful resistance and exerts authorial mastery by appropriating the patient’s truth and constructing the momentous theory of primal fantasies to be translated après coup. In the memoir, Pankejeff presents his alienation from the psychoanalytic persona attributed to him and, in the process of reclaiming authorial subjectivity, finds himself exhibiting only partial aspects of his story, with a continuous denial of his sexual life and symptomatology. ⁷

Freud concludes the case of the Wolf Man by describing it as “the case which put the severest obstacles in the way of any description of it” (1918, p. 104). The Wolf Man’s text is thereby offered to psychoanalysis as a mysterious riddle, and the psychoanalytic community follows his curiosity and “instinct for knowledge” (Freud 1905, p. 194) by continuous research. Perhaps Pankejeff’s inability to renounce psychoanalysis affected Freud and the psychoanalytic community, who, in this entanglement of impossible mourning, could not renounce Pankejeff either. The theme of the veil gives literary expression to the movement from the fantasy of an embryo in a timeless and everlasting womb, “a special child of fortune whom no ill could befall” (Freud 1918, p. 99), to the premature delivery, forcing the eyes to open wide and exposing the subject to the wild stare of the wolves, a new experience of looking and being looked at. Thus, the reader is presented with a narrative of continuous melancholy and suffering, corrupted sexuality and love relations, and the erotization of guilt.

The traumatic suicides of Pankejeff’s sister and wife were marked by the distinct characteristics of the relationship Pankejeff had with each of them. These relations were conflictual because of disavowed, sadomasochistically tinged sexual urges that had to be kept veiled. Pankejeff’s determined attempts to corrupt his relationship with his nurse Therese can be considered a reversal of his sister’s seduction of him. Therese likely suffered considerably in her marriage to this troubled man, but Pankejeff appears to have little awareness of how this might have affected her. Similar dynamics were enacted by Freud and Pankejeff, and to a lesser degree by Mack Brunswick and Gardiner, for the texts written by analyst and analysand suggest the ways in which relationships of helping can become erotized and corrupted, and how care can become entangled with use, misuse, and exploitation. We can conclude from the texts written by Pankejeff and by Freud, Mack Brunswick, and Gardiner that they all eventually came to feel a sense of exploitation in connection to what was kept veiled: the veil and the veiled of the analysand’s unconscious dynamics.

These complex entanglements of transference relations found their path into the politics of the case study and the memoir; they are also connected with the association of Freud with the gazing wolf. The vicissitudes of the transference relations between Freud and Pankejeff and the manifold variations of veiled truth presented by the literature about this man and his analysis demonstrate the complexity of the analytic process and the riddles it entails. In “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” Benjamin discusses the essence of materiality, which he calls the beautiful. Within the context of the unity of veil and veiled, he articulates it as the secret:

The task of art criticism is not to lift the veil but rather, through the most precise knowledge of it as a veil, to raise itself for the first time to the true view of the beautiful. To the view that will never open itself to so-called empathy and will only imperfectly open itself to a purer contemplation of the naïve: to the view of the beautiful as that which is secret. . . . Since only the beautiful and outside it nothing—veiling or being veiled—can be essential, the divine ground of the being of beauty lies in the secret. So then the semblance in it is just this: not the superfluous veiling of things in themselves but rather the necessary veiling of things for us [1925, p. 351].

What gives our lives meaning, what cures the tortured psyche, and what gives comfort: these are infinite riddles. These existential riddles are constructed from the unity of the veil and the veiled, from life and its vicissitudes, and from the secret that makes them beautiful.