The Wolfman: Symptoms as a Representation of Identificatory Conflicts

This text explores the connectivity between sexual differentiation and the Wolfman’s complicated symptomatology, tracing its progress through the dream and the primal scene to his latter-day complaint about the world being hidden by a veil. Sergei Pankejeff (1887-1979) moved to Germany from Russia, his country of birth, in the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1905. The following year, his sister Anna committed suicide. This was followed in 1907 by his father’s suicide, reducing the family unit to mother and son three years before he commenced his analysis with Freud in 1910, at which time he was twenty three years old.…