Coda: Sigismund's Wolves

As the essays in this issue vividly illustrate, Freud's “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis”—ubiquitously known as the “Wolf Man” case—can still lead the reader, one hundred years after its publication, down many fascinating yet little-traversed paths. And deep in the forest is the animal that, despite having its name endlessly evoked as the moniker for Freud's essay and the person whose story is told there, remains largely unseen. So, as we conclude this commemoration of Freud's well-known case, we will let the wolves have the last word.

To use the occasion of revisiting this text as a chance to consider the complexities of lupine fears and fantasies would seem, in part, to carry forward the way in which these animals figure in the story. After all, “six or seven” wolves appear here in the childhood dream of Freud's patient, Sergei Pankejeff, sometime between his fourth and sixth years. He recounted: as he lay in his bed, a nearby window suddenly opened, revealing the pack gazing in as they sat on “the big walnut tree in front of the window” (Freud, 1918, p. 29). Pankejeff awoke “in great terror” (p. 29), filled with the fear of becoming the animals' prey. His associations to the dream included mention of several well-known children's stories that feature a wolf, among them “Little Red Riding Hood.” Freud noted that in this popular tale the animal appears to the youthful protagonist twice, once in the forest and again, in a shockingly displaced setting, when she encounters it as it “lies in bed in the grandmother's night-cap” (p. 31). Yet the wolf's disparate guises are effortlessly subsumed here within Freud's interpretation, where they are dispensed with early on in the text. He declares that the animal is “merely a first father-surrogate” (p. 32), both in these children's stories and in his patient's dream.

Freud's dismissal of Pankejeff's wolves occurred a decade after the publication of his Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900) and would appear to corrob