Serge's autobiography The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man described a lot of
challenges that would affect any person, not just him, and is a good companion
piece to Freud's paper. His earliest memories included memories of illness
Another memory was of Serge's parents who went on a trip abroad.
His parents left...
Later on Serge called Miss Oven...
Serge's memories, like for most people, shift and change. Certain
underlying patterns of who he liked or disliked would remain the same, but
details like the story that scared him in Freud's analysis The Wolf and
the seven little kids morphed into a similar story Little Red Riding Hood.
Serge described his mother in a more adult sense.
Serge learned about religion from his mother and Nanya. His doubts about God's
omnipotence, not being able to stop evil, made him feel guilty that it was a
terrible sin to doubt. Not knowing if there was a God or not influenced Serge
to play it safe with faith. Ambivalence between faith and reason was with him
throughout his life. Another important memory related to Serge's sister is in
the autobiography.
Serge lived on an estate that grew crops and raised sheep. The white wolves, who looked more like
sheep dogs, may have influenced his dream. His memory of those sheep was that
200,000 of them were inoculated with a wrong serum and died.
Between Serge's parents wandering around and he himself involved in moves, he was
a wanderer from the beginning. I found photos of his former estate, Dubiecki Manor,
that was purchased by his father one year before Serge's birth. It's a ruin
now in modern Ukraine, nicknamed The Wolf Lair, but one can imagine the tree
he saw out the window, like a Freudian psycho-archaeologist. Which window did he
look out of? What were the walnut trees like back then?
The big emotional move for Serge was his first permanent move south.
Serge described his uncles and their different personalities.
This uncle went from sad to happy, but unfortunately his other uncle went in the opposite direction. Uncle Peter, had a sunny happy disposition, but...
Nanya ended up living as a pensioner with the family, as well as a French governess
who seemed to know the secret of happiness, which is concentration.
Another influence in Serge's religious life was an Austrian tutor who was an atheist. Being around
him allowed Serge to accept that his religious doubts were personal and it
was up to us individually to decide if we want to have faith. The problem with
Serge was how to deal with the transference, that for so many people,
keeps them feeling secure.
This would be a deep question that would resound for the rest of his life.
How does one stop the search for a parental replacement and feel secure
with oneself? The aimlessness wasn't affecting only
Serge. His sister Anna seemed to feel isolated and lost.
After the shock of her death Serge ruminated on reasons why she would do that.
Late in life during his interview with Karin, Serge recounted more details of his sister.
Later Serge recounts an important story of his sister running away with the
daughter of the chief gardener. They had the idea that they wanted to hire
themselves out as maids. She later said...
After Anna's death Serge noticed his father move his interest from his
daughter to him. Serge also had depression and thoughts of suicide.
He eventually changed his choice of studies in University and decided to take a trip
to the Caucasus to improve his emotional state, and tagging along was a family
acquaintance. He was enthusiastic about the region and owned property, 'a Green Cape',
in Batum. The trip started in Novorossysk and...
Lermontov who insulted a man named Martinov and his clothing, and didn't know he overheard him, was
challenged to a duel.
Serge identified with Lermontov because a
friend once said that he looked like him.  Identification can be a lot of fun,
but pathological if morbid elements are imitated too much, like tragic deaths.
Lermontov had a bad end, his sister also had a bad end in the Caucasus, and Serge
was veering in that self-destructive path.
After visiting the grotto, their trip
became more rugged as they ascended to the glaciers on Mount Kasbek by mule
starting from Vladikavkaz.
In a grief travel, the trip is more about dealing with emptiness and loss than to relax
and have a good time. Anybody who traveled to escape,
especially on long arduous journeys should identify with Serge's masochism and grief.
After an extended stay where Serge's friend caught up with his friends and
acquaintances, they continued on the Georgian Military Highway. Along the
highway Serge found a place where he could paint.
As they moved out of the mountains they
descended into a vast steppe with a warmer climate.
Their trip continued from Abastuman to Batum, their final destination.
Despite having an amazing vacation, when major decisions are postponed, they have
to be faced. When Serge returned from his holiday, he still had to decide on his
vocation. He talked to his father in sessions lasting hours to figure out his problem.
Eventually he chose Law because his
attempt to move to the Natural Sciences was more out of avoidance than actual interest.
He moved to St. Petersburg with an uncle to continue his studies.
He still had depressions and his father setup a meeting with his old doctor for him.
He tried to get involved in St. Petersburg life.
Dating, museums, and lectures left him...
He eventually asked his father for advice on a sanatorium for him to really
deal with this problem, which at the time was diagnosed as manic-depression, like
his father was diagnosed. He consulted with Professor Bekhterev in Petersburg,
Kraepelin in Munich, and Ziehen in Berlin. He met is love Therese in one of the
sanatoriums in Munich, who was a nurse. But in regards to the success of
improving his mental stability, he briefly felt better only to relapse, as
as was his prior pattern. He then describes the classic description of what narcissism does to your perception.
When your mind is preoccupied with success, status, and advancement, and strategies of how to get there, there is
a loss of appreciation of what is around you. It looks hollow because most of the
environment is drained of meaning for your goals. The environment is taken for
granted or is viewed as an obstacle. His "veil" was made of dreams and hopes
projected onto an environment, like a fog separating one from reality. Narcissism
can happen to anyone, but when the pathology is severe, it's a regular state of mind.
Being lost in possibilities for power, control and managing fears of
uncertainty, covers over your perception in the here and now. It can also act as a
barrier to appreciation. You can see that in a prior video that includes some of
Heidegger's meditation practices which was in response to the narcissistic
method of Nietzsche. I still have to read more Nietzsche and Heidegger, but what it
looks like now is that Nietzsche's method can easily turn into narcissism,
with that style of rumination over success and power, and Heidegger blamed
Nietzsche for that influence which lead him to his ultimate involvement with
Nazism and all the rumination about power that it entails. As I read more, it
could be a misreading that some people did when they read Nietzsche, or an
inevitable consequence of obsessive self-development. The problem with self-development
is that one is constantly seeking future improvements and getting
addicted to only thinking about that. There has to be a balance between
planning in your mind and appreciation in the moment. One of Serge's goals he
was ruminating about was developing a relationship with his, then not yet wife
Therese. He pursued her, but kept his desire secret from other nurses and
doctors. He tried to meet her at Nymphenburg park, but was stood up while
he waited into the night. He still pursued her.
She eventually consented to walk in the English park with him and talk
about her family, and her German and Spanish background. Her calm demeanor
with her tragedies, such as her divorce, made her more attractive to him. He
focused on finding rooms to rent to privately meet with her, but she rejected
him to focus on nursing and her daughter Else. Serge was so depressed that he
swallowed a handful of sleeping tablets, but in the end it did no more damage
other than making him wake up more slowly. He still tried to meet with
herese only to get another rejection via a letter. Kraepelin and other doctors
suggested that he focus on getting out of his manic-depression instead of
pursuing Therese. Serge left the sanatorium and stayed at the Bayerischer Hof
and pleaded with Therese to see her at least one last time before leaving
Munich to never see her again. Later Serge welcomed a visit from his mother,
who was able to soothe his ups and downs. They briefly went to Lake Constance
where Serge's painful nostalgia returned. The location evoked...
Spending time with his family abroad, resuscitated Serge's positivity. Serge
told his uncle in Paris of his love affair with Therese.
He also gave him connections to Odessa society ladies.
When Serge returned to Odessa, he waited for his father to return from Moscow.
He wanted to go to the theater but a violent storm made him return to the hotel. He was found dead in his bed in the hotel
the next day, despite being young and considered in good health.
Crucially Serge surmised that...
Serge received a condolence letter from Therese who found out what happened.
After the funeral and the process of disposing the will, Serge got into
arguments with his mother and her secretiveness. He wasn't to get his
portion of the inheritance until the age of 28, but it was understandable due to
his mental condition. With this disappointment, Serge moved on with his life,
and resumed his painting. He also took lessons.
Some of his paintings got recognition, but he fell back into
indecision about focusing on painting or continuing his law studies. Eventually he
went back to Kraepelin to notify him of his father's death.
Serge looked at himself now as a "hereditary case", but there was also a
silver lining because he would be close enough to Therese to meet her again. They
did meet and agreed to stay in touch by letter. He felt that his meeting
Krepelin was just a pretext to see Therese again and that was why he was
depressed. Her letter of condolence brought up desires of being with her.
His depression abated when he met up with her again. He met up with her in Berlin
at the Central Hotel. This time their desires reversed. He now was ambivalent
about the relationship and she was more eager to be married since she had a
daughter and was suffering financial hardship. It blew up in fight in the hotel.
He left for the Schlachtensee and wrote a farewell letter to her with the
excuse of his mental condition. As expected, Serge had feelings of regret
and fell back into depression. Over time he eventually was referred to Sigmund Freud
as an attempt to try something different, and like with many of Freud's
patients, he was a last option when other modalities failed. During this time
Serge's Uncle Peter, who had paranoia, died. He was alone and only around animals.
He was found later when his delivered food wasn't touched. Rats had been
chewing on him during this time. Therese found out in a newspaper article titled
"A Millionaire Gnawed by Rats." The law stepped in and Serge was included in the
disbursement of his assets, relieving some of the resentment of having to wait
until he was 28 to get his father's inheritance.
When he started with Freud, Freud pointed out that his behaviour was normal up
until the final break where he was now falling into a pattern of...
But Freud wanted the analysis to continue for some months before
returning to Therese. Freud's analysis was hourly, so Serge was able to acquaint
himself with the pleasures of Vienna and learned to play card games. Despite Freud's
prohibition on Therese, Serge sent a detective to find her whereabouts.
When the war broke out, there were anti-Russian sentiments, and Serge and
his mother returned to Odessa for the summer before his planned wedding with
Therese. Therese stayed behind in Germany with her daughter.
Luckily for Serge, being an only child, he avoided being conscripted. After the
the war broke out he had to go through a lot of legal work to get Therese a permit to
enter Odessa. When she arrived they finally got married, though she sold
herself short by saying to Serge...
...as if he was marrying someone else. Despite anti-German attitudes
Therese put effort into learning Russian until she was able converse with people.
Unfortunately she didn't get a long with her mother-in-law who
fought over who ran the household. During this time Serge focused on his law exams and passed, but
when things were going well, there was an ever present danger to ruin
circumstances. For example, during the Ukrainian independence attempt
and the Soviet Bolshevik victory, Serge was caught in crossfire.
With the constant flip flop between different revolutions and
fighting forces, Odessa finally landed in the hands of the Austrians. This allowed
Therese an opportunity to get to Germany to visit her daughter Else who was
was in serious condition with pneumonia.
The biggest devastation to Serge's
independence came with economic shocks during the war.
By the time Serge made it back to Germany, despite a lot of red tape
related to his Russian ethnicity, he brought what money he could. He saw
Therese again, but now with a shock of white hair. Else was diagnosed as
terminal with her tuberculosis and died a couple of months later. During this
dark time, Serge met Freud again who felt there was still a residue left that
needed to be analyzed and this analysis stretched out until 1920.
By exhausting his connections, including Freud, he was able to find an
economics professor who got him an opportunity with an insurance company, a
job that would sustain him for years.
Some years after the war Serge was again stuck in obsessions. Freud assigned him to
one of his followers Ruth Mack Brunswick. When she saw him he was...
Ruth continued associating his complaint that "I can't go on living like this anymore" to his other statements
going back to childhood when he soiled himself and thought that he had dysentery, and
when he contracted gonorrhea before his sessions with Freud. It was an
identification with his mother.
His obsession turned towards reflections.
Unfortunately Serge didn't have enough
money to pay for the analysis. With no work and dealing with a wife who was ill,
Freud was able to collect money for him for six years.
Ruth described Freud's interest in the patient as someone...
Despite the supposed cure, Serge not only continued identification with his
mother, but also his sister. Before his analysis with Ruth, just like his sister...
Unfortunately the nose symptoms returned
with a pimple on his nose.
Serge had suicidal thoughts about his looks, and he went to his old dermatologist to have the
pimple removed. The blood gave him a sense of relief, but he began to worry
about scarring. In the end he had minor scarring that ended up being, "the finest white line."
Like in my review on the treatment of Narcissism, Ruth appeared to
fall into the trap of positive transference, where it's easy for both
therapist and patient to flatter each other.
When Ruth mentioned the death of the
dermatologist that worked on his nose, which was the first time Serge heard of
the news, he admitted a desire to kill him, sue him
or expose him.
Ruth then tried to connect this hatred of the dermatologist back to a possible hatred
f Freud. Here Serge defended Freud and viewed his analysis with him more as a
a friendly connection than a professional one.
Ruth countered that Serge was not invited to visit Freud and his family, so
was not really a close friend. She saw that the patient was stuck wanting to
stay Freud's favourite son.
What he didn't live through enough was seeing his false self in action. Serge wanted to maintain the
pleasant feelings of being the star patient to bask in Freud's success. He
also had financial needs, needs for social praise and survival needs.
At the end of Ruth's analysis she declared a cure based on the awareness of his nasal
obsession being the same as the gonorrheal infection. An emotional castration.
This went back to his identification with his mother and
dysentery, and a lingering attachment to his father.
In his interview with Karin Obholzer, Serge didn't think that Ruth's analysis helped him as much as his own
determination, especially when he didn't agree with the diagnosis of paranoia.
Despite the accomplishment in using willpower to drop his nose obsession,
Serge would have to face more losses and grief.
Things were going well for Serge with his paintings and vacations, until 1938,
a bad year for Austria.
Despite Therese being somewhat sympathetic to the Germans, she was
starting to deteriorate markedly.
As anti-semitism started to increase in
Austria, and many Jews were starting to commit suicide,
Therese made a strange remark. She said that...
Later on she shocked Serge again and said...
She quickly spoke of other normal things as if she never said anything so extreme.
A week later the couple went for an outing to Grinzing.
Her reaction to this was curious and then one day when he went to work...
The morbid scene when he returned home showed that Therese was
serious about using gas to commit suicide, and had planned it out far in advance.
She had been dead for several hours.
Therese's last letters were cryptic of the cause of her
suicidal thoughts. Did she think that she had a Jewish ancestor
that would be found out? Did she have a terminal disease that she kept secret? In one letter
Despite living with Therese, Serge
couldn't clearly say why Therese committed suicide. Maybe it was Hitler
and she was afraid that her Spanish ancestry had Jewish in it. She also
complained about aging and her health...
After the disaster Serge found Psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner and asked for help...
Muriel guided the panicked Wolf-Man to her apartment. Serge used to teach Muriel Russian grammar and
talk about his favourite subjects, French Impressionists, Doestoevsky and of course Freud.
Muriel couldn't keep up the lessons when she began studying medicine,
but she would still be visited by Serge to renew her insurance, since he was
working for an insurance company at the time. Serge was in a depressed mood.
Serge found his wife Terese dead in the gas-filled kitchen and this was recognizable to Muriel.
Muriel managed to get a passport for him and he left for Paris to meet up
with Mack Brunswick for more sessions. Muriel went to the U.S. Serge followed
Brunswick to England and he returned to Vienna
during the Munich Pact. Muriel continued to receive some letters in the United States
from Serge until Pearl Harbour. After the war was over
news of the Wolf-Man communicated his good mental health and acceptance of his
lot in life. He continued to work in insurance and took care of his mother.
Though, more sad news arrived about Ruth Mack Brunswick's untimely death. She had
died of a fall in the bathroom while on opiates.
She had a painful gastrointestinal illness which led to her dependence on painkillers.
On a later visit to Salzburg Muriel negotiated a meeting with the
Wolf-Man in Linz. Serge talked about how he benefited from Ruth's comfort but
also criticized saying...
He also talked about the kind of women he was attracted to. Muriel
pointed out that his taste in women was the same, and connected with his
sister's influence. He gained some solace when his mother was opened up more about
her own life, which...
Both Gardiner and Pankejeff continued sending letters to each other
while Serge continued writing his memoirs. A highlight of those letters was
when he got in trouble with Russian soldiers. One day in 1951 he went out to
paint, and out of a nostalgia for the Russia of his boyhood he wandered away
from the English zone into Russian zone by mistake. He went to the top of a
hill and found a nice landscape to paint. When he returned to go home and walked
towards a streetcar line he was surrounded by Russian guards. He was
interrogated, but strangely, after a few days, the interrogator decided to talk
about Russian literature instead. They made an agreement where he would return
in 3 weeks to show his other paintings and provide personal
documents. Out of a duty to make sure that his case was definitely resolved, he
took another chance and returned to the Russian zone. When Serge went back,
none of the interrogators were there but instead a different soldier who looked
at the paintings and talked about his son who also painted. In the end, they
showed no interest in Serge. They warned him that all he needed to do was ask
permission and they would allow him to paint.
As age creeped up on Serge he started to admit some of his struggles.
Quoting from later works of Freud he
showed how difficult it was to deal with strong impulses.
For Gardiner, much of Serge's complaints about losses, like in his family, and his loss of status, he
handled it about as well as many people can. For her...
In the final chapter of Serge's story we
will hear from his perspective looking
back over his entire life, and a new
challenge: The cycle of abuse. We will also
look more into obsession and
homosexuality, and a failed attempt at
conversion therapy, by Freud. The Iistina,
the truth behind appearances,
continues its slippery elusiveness.
