Dr. Moshe Wulff is a pioneer in psychoanalysis with whom we in the West now have, in the new rapprochement with the Soviet Union, an opportunity to renew acquaintance. Dr. Wulff holds a special distinction in Freudian history—he was physician to the Wolf Man.
According to Ruth Mack Brunswick [A supplement to Freud's “History of an Infantile Neurosis, Int J. Psycho-Anal, 9, 1928], Moshe Wulff, a native of Odessa, ”knew and attended the patient and both his parents.“ Although Dr. Drosnes appears to have been the Odessa psychiatrist who actually brought Pankejeff to Freud in 1910 [see Patrick Mahony, Cries of the Wolf-Man, Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, 1984]—and in fact Pankejeff in his own memoirs speaks of ”Dr. D [is]…. probably the only person in Odessa who knows of the existence of Freud and psychoanalysis,“ (The Wolf-Man, by the Wolf-Man, ed. Muriel Gardner, Basic Books, 1971). Moshe Wulff had returned there the year before, in 1909, after studying with Karl Abraham in Berlin, first in medicine, then in psychoanalysis. By December 1909, Wulff was already in written communication with Freud, according to Ernest Jones.
Wulff joined the Vienna Society in 1912 following his earliest publication, “Contributions to Infantile Sexuality,” which was so well regarded that it became required reading for analytic candidates.
In 1914, Wulff moved to Moscow, where he worked at a private sanitarium and then at the Psychiatric Neurological Institute and a military psychiatric hospital, where he implemented analytically oriented treatment plans. After the Revolution, he headed a psychoanalytic department in a clinic at the University of Moscow and directed the children's home of Zermakov.
He left the Soviet Union in 1927 for political reasons and returned to Berlin with his wife. He worked under Ernst Simmel at the famous Tegelsee sanitarium, where Freud recuperated after his treatments for cancer and where Wulff met Anna Freud.
“While my father's time was taken up almost completely by painful and exhausting surgical procedures, I was left with sufficient leisure to listen to the new and exciting problems encountered in this ‘widening scope’ of psychoanalytic work,“ she wrote in a commemorative issue of the Israel Annals of Psychiatry about Schloss Tegel and Moshe Wulff in 1978, a century after his birth.
In 1933, following the rise of National Socialism, the Wulffs emigrated again, this time to Palestine. The following year, he joined Max Eitingon in cofounding a psychoanalytic society with Schalith.
Moshe Wulff, who never underwent a personal analysis, educated a generation of Israeli analysts and served as president of the society for a decade following Eitingon's death. By the mid 1960s, reports Ruth Jaffe in Psychoanalytic Pioneers, “Most of the directors of the public mental institutions, psychiatric departments, and outpatient clinics of the Tel Aviv district, and elsewhere are psychiatrists trained by Wulff.” He also made an enduring impact on kibbutz education through his lectures to teachers and by the influence of his pupil-advocate, S. Golan, head of the central education committee of the kibbutz movement Hashomer Hatzair.
Moshe Wulff died in 1971, a respected pioneer of psychoanalysis.
Megan Marshack