Freud (1918): The Wolfman Dream Analysis Study

Why Freud investigated the Wolfman

Freud’s Wolfman study, published in 1918, examined a childhood dream and its possible connection to a fear of wolves. Freud was a doctor working in Vienna who believed that unconscious memories, wishes and fears could influence behaviour. He used psychoanalysis to explore these influences, including asking patients to describe dreams and interpreting their possible meanings.

His patient was Sergei Pankejeff, a Russian aristocrat born in Odessa in 1886. Freud used the pseudonym ‘Wolfman’ to protect his identity. Freud reported that Sergei initially had an excellent relationship with his father and wanted to become a ‘gentleman’ like him. Following his sister Anna’s suicide in 1906, Sergei developed symptoms of depression. His father also died by suicide in 1907. Sergei sought treatment, and his physician took him to Freud in Vienna in 1910.

Although treatment began when Sergei was an adult, this case history concentrated on his infantile neurosis: psychological difficulties during childhood. These began shortly before his fourth birthday as an animal phobia and developed into obsessive-compulsive difficulties with religious content, whose effects persisted into his tenth year. The study is not a complete account of his illness, treatment and recovery.

Freud’s aim was to document this childhood neurosis and uncover the hidden meaning of the wolf dream, explaining both its visible content and Sergei’s fear of wolves.

How the case study was conducted

This was a longitudinal case study of one participant. Freud gathered detailed information over several years of therapy rather than manipulating an independent variable in an experiment. The childhood neurosis was reported to and analysed by Freud approximately 15 years after it had ended. The investigation was therefore retrospective: it depended on an adult looking back on childhood experiences.

The central material consisted of Sergei’s remembered dream, his accounts of childhood experiences and associations, and a drawing of the dream scene. During therapeutic conversations, Freud explored these accounts and developed interpretations of their underlying meaning. For example, Sergei’s later recollection that the dream occurred shortly before Christmas helped Freud develop a further explanation of the tree.

The distinction between manifest content and latent content is essential here. Manifest content is what Sergei remembered dreaming; latent content is the unconscious meaning Freud believed lay behind it. The latter was an interpretation, not something directly observed in the dream.

What the Wolfman remembered dreaming

Sergei recalled having the dream shortly before his fourth birthday. It was winter and night-time. He was lying in bed, with the foot of the bed beneath a window. Outside stood walnut trees.

The window suddenly opened by itself. In a large walnut tree sat six or seven white wolves, motionless and looking at him. Their large tails resembled those of foxes, and their pointed ears resembled those of dogs watching something. Terrified that the wolves would eat him, Sergei screamed and woke up. His nurse came to comfort him, but the dream seemed so lifelike that he took some time to calm down.

Sergei described the dream slightly differently on different occasions. He connected his fear with an illustration of an upright wolf in a fairy-tale book. Freud developed a different explanation after exploring the dream during therapy.

Freud’s interpretation: a hidden childhood event

Freud interpreted the opening window as an ‘eye-opening’ experience: Sergei had seen something frightening that he was not supposed to witness. He also proposed a reversal. Although the wolves watched Sergei in the dream, Freud believed that Sergei had originally been the one watching.

Freud inferred that, at about 18 months old, Sergei had witnessed his parents having sexual intercourse from behind. In Freud’s reconstruction, Sergei had been suffering from malaria and sleeping in a cot in his parents’ bedroom during the afternoon. Freud called the supposed event the primal scene and believed its traumatic memory had been repressed into the unconscious.

These were Freud’s claims about the latent content. They should not be treated as independently established facts about Sergei’s childhood.

Freud linked particular dream details to this interpretation:

Wishes, fear and the Christmas tree

During a later session, Sergei remembered that the dream occurred shortly before Christmas, which was also his birthday. Freud associated the tree with a Christmas tree and interpreted the wolves as replacing anticipated presents. The pleasure expected from receiving gifts represented, in Freud’s view, an unconscious wish for sexual pleasure from his father.

Freud argued that Sergei had seen pleasure on his mother’s face during the supposed primal scene and wished to experience the same pleasure. However, he also proposed that Sergei mistakenly understood his mother’s lack of a penis as evidence that his father had castrated her. Freud believed this created castration anxiety and fear of his father. This describes Freud’s interpretation of the child’s supposed belief, not a real act of castration.

The dream therefore combined a wish with a threat. Freud interpreted being eaten by wolves as an expression of fear of the father, while seeking comfort from the nurse represented turning to someone less threatening. He argued that the fear of the father was repressed and expressed consciously as a fear of wolves.

What Freud concluded

Freud used the case to argue that the unconscious can strongly influence behaviour. In his explanation, a traumatic childhood experience was repressed but continued to affect Sergei through disturbing dreams and an animal phobia. A hidden memory or fear could therefore appear in consciousness in a changed, symbolic form.

The case connected dream analysis with Freud’s wider theory: interpreting manifest content was intended to reveal latent wishes, fears and memories. It also contributed to his ideas about psychosexual development, although the focus here is the wolf dream and its initial interpretations.

How convincing is the evidence?

A strength is the depth of the case study. Several years of contact allowed Freud to explore the dream alongside Sergei’s personal history and later recollections. This produced a detailed account of one person’s experiences that a brief investigation would not provide.

However, the interpretations were subjective. Freud assigned sexual meanings to wolves, tails and presents, but another analyst could interpret the same images differently. Sergei’s own explanation involving a frightening fairy-tale picture also offered an alternative. Detailed information does not necessarily make Freud’s interpretation correct.

There are also problems with memory accuracy. Sergei recalled childhood difficulties long after they ended, and his dream descriptions varied. If the remembered material changed or was inaccurate, the interpretation built upon it would be less convincing.

The proposed primal scene was not independently verified. Because unconscious meanings cannot be directly observed, it is difficult to test whether Freud’s explanation is correct or show what evidence would disprove it. The case therefore does not establish that the inferred event caused the dream or phobia.

Finally, the sample consisted of one wealthy Russian man receiving treatment. His experiences cannot establish that all dreams or phobias arise in the same way. Overall, the study is a detailed example of Freudian dream analysis, but its retrospective evidence, subjective interpretation and limited sample mean it provides weak support for a general explanation of dreaming.