The Lupine Anxieties of ‘Wolfish’

It is 1910 in Vienna and, lying prone on Sigmund Freud’s couch, Russian emigré and psychoanalytic patient Sergei Pankejeff—better known to literary posterity as, simply, “The Wolf Man”—describes a troubling nightmare. In the dream, Sergei is sleeping when he suddenly wakes to see six or seven white wolves perched in the fir tree opposite his bedroom window. “The wolves were quite white, and had big tails and had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something,” he narrates. “In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed, and woke up.”

Freud sets to work decoding the dream logic, stitching together a suite of wolf and wolf-adjacent content from; his grandfather’s affectionate habit of threatening to “gobble him up” like a wolf; the childhood experience of watching two dogs copulate. Finally, Freud emerges triumphant: “The form taken by the [patient’s] anxiety, the fear of ‘being eaten by the wolf,’” he concludes in his usual unflappable style, was but the “transposition of the wish to be copulated with by his father.” In the culturally overdetermined figure of a ravenous wolf, Sergei’s unconscious had lighted upon the perfect symbol to condense his contradictory desire for and fear of sexual ravishment.