Freud and the Interpretation of the Wolf-Man Dream—A Dog Story?1

FREUD WROTE IN 1910 to his Hungarian colleague Sandor Ferenczi about a new case he had started. In the first session the new patient "confessed to me the following transferences: Jewish swindler, he would like to use me from behind and shit on my head" (Gay, 1988, p. 287). A lively beginning to the case that produced the Wolf-Man dream, the second most famous dream in the psychoanalytic literature after the Irma dream.

Sergei Pankejeff, the Wolf-Man, came to Freud in February of 1910 and the treatment continued until July 1914. He had been unsuccessfully treated by two of Freud's enemies, Theodor Ziehen and Emil Kraepelin. The treatment began in a sanitarium and was later transferred to Freud's private practice in his home at Bergasse 19. The patient was a severely disturbed young man of 23, the only son of an extremely wealthy aristocratic Russian family. His health had deteriorated at age 18 after a gonorrhea infection and he became incapacitated and had to be cared for by others. His father had been diagnosed as manic-depressive and his mother was both physically ill and hypochondriacal. His sister and only sibling, two years older, a very brilliant young woman to whom he was very attached, had treated him sadistically in childhood, became emotionally disturbed in adolescence, and committed suicide at age 21. He grew up on a large estate near Odessa, lonely and emotionally abandoned by his parents who often travelled, leaving him in the hands of a governess. From early childhood