Sergei Konstantinovitch Pankejeff (Russian: Серге́й Константи́нович Панке́ев; December 24, 1886 – May 7, 1979) was a Russian aristocrat from Odessa best known for being a patient of Sigmund Freud, who gave him the pseudonym of Wolf Man (der Wolfsmann) to protect his identity, after a dream Pankejeff had of a tree full of white wolves.
Biography
The Pankejeff family (note: this is Freud's German transliteration from the Russian; in English it would today be transliterated as Pankeyev) was a wealthy family in St. Petersburg. 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 During his review of Freud's letters and other files, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson uncovered notes for an unpublished paper by Freud's associate Ruth Mack Brunswick.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 asked her to review the Pankejeff case, and she discovered evidence that Pankejeff had been sexually abused by a family member during his childhood.
In 1906, his older sister Anna committed suicide while visiting the site of Mikhail Lermontov's fatal duel, and by 1907 Sergei began to show signs of serious depression himself. Sergei's father Konstantin also suffered from depression, often connected to specific political happenings of the day, and committed suicide in 1907 by consuming an excess of sleeping medication, a few months after Sergei had left for Munich to seek treatment for his own ailment. While in Munich, Pankejeff saw many doctors and stayed voluntarily at a number of elite psychiatric hospitals. In the summers he always visited Russia.