Sergei Pankejeff
Sergei Pankejeff
Main page
1925955

Sergei Pankejeff

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Sergei Pankejeff

Sergei Konstantinovitch Pankejeff (Russian: Серге́й Константи́нович Панке́ев; 24 December 1886 – 7 May 1979) was a Russian aristocrat from Odesa in the Russian Empire. Pankejeff is best known for being a patient of Sigmund Freud, who gave him the pseudonym of the Wolf Man (German: der Wolfsmann) to protect his identity, after a dream Pankejeff had of a tree full of white wolves.

Pankejeff was born on the 24 December 1886 at his family's estate near Kakhovka on the river Dnieper. The Pankejeff family (Freud's German transliteration from the Russian; in English it would be transliterated as Pankeyev) was a wealthy family in St. Petersburg.

His father was Konstantin Matviyovich Pankeyev and his mother was Anna Semenivna, née Shapovalova.

Pankejeff's parents were married young and had a happy marriage, but his mother became sickly and was therefore somewhat absent from the lives of her two children. Pankejeff would later describe her as cold and lacking tenderness, though she would show special affection to him when he was sickly.

His father Konstantin, while being a cultured man and a keen hunter, was also an alcoholic who suffered from depressive episodes. He had been treated by Moshe Wulff (a disciple of Freud). He would later be diagnosed by Kraepelin with manic depressive disorder. His mother (Pankejeff's grandmother) had fallen into a depressive state after the death of a daughter and was thought to have died of suicide, while a paternal uncle of Pankejeff's was diagnosed with paranoia by the neuropsychiatrist Korsakov and admitted to an asylum.

Sergei and his sister Anna were brought up by two servants; Nanja and Grusha and an English governess named Miss Oven. Sergei's education would later be taken over by male tutors.

Sergei attended a grammar school in Russia, but after the 1905 Russian Revolution he spent considerable time abroad studying.

During his review of Freud's letters and other files, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson uncovered notes for an unpublished paper by Freud's associate Ruth Mack Brunswick. Freud had asked her to review the Pankejeff case, and she discovered evidence that Pankejeff had been sexually abused by a family member during his childhood.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.