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The wolf as symbol has been of intermittent interest to me for several years. It was Géza Róheim's article, The Wolf and the Seven Kids, in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly (Vol. XXII, No. 2, 1953) that stimulated me to further consideration of the wolf. I was able to discover more about my own private dramas in which the wolf figured as protagonist and at the same time was moved to learn more about the wolf and his meanings in the broader cultural sphere. I had not shared Dr. Róheim's doubt that the wolf who ate the kids was father, although I agreed it was mother; thus, I think the wolf is father and mother simultaneously. But before I outline my reasons, I should like to draw attention to the wolf as significant figure for European man.
The wolf is an animal whose habitat is widely spread in Europe, Asia, and North America, and has been a common rapacious foe to the domestic economy of human beings in its attacks on their flocks. Yet the wolf, as we shall see, is not always bad. It is often bad, evil, cruel, voracious, and identified with what is Satanic. To speak of the devil was in Latin lupus in fabula, while in French parler du loup, c'est voir sa queue. Other expressions include méfiez-vous du loup; genus ave luporum atque canum; hac urget lupus, hac canis angit; to keep the wolf from the door; a wolf in sheep's clothing; he is a wolf; like a wolf on the fold; cry wolf; hungry as a wolf. But in both European and Asian folklore it is the wolf who suckles the human child and a wild child is a “wolf child” who has lacked a human mother's care but has been nurtured by a wolf. Kipling created a whole wolf family for a human child. The most famous wolf is probably the wolf-mother of Romulus and Remus, founders of the Eternal City, immortalized in fable and in statues still to be seen in Italy.