[3][1] Sergei and his sister Anna were brought up by two servants; Nanja and Grusha and an English governess named Miss Oven.

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

[4] In 1906, his older sister Anna committed suicide through the use of quicksilver while visiting the site of Mikhail Lermontov's fatal duel.

During a stay in Kraepelin's sanatorium near Neuwittelsbach, he met a nurse who worked there, Theresa-Maria Keller, whom he fell in love with and wanted to marry.

Pankejeff's "nervous problems" included his inability to have bowel movements without the assistance of an enema, as well as debilitating depression.

Freud's first publication on the "Wolf Man" was "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose), written at the end of 1914, but not published until 1918.

It was the third detailed case study, after "Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis" in 1908 (also known by its animal nickname "Rat Man"), that did not involve Freud analyzing himself, and which brought together the main aspects of catharsis, the unconscious, sexuality, and dream analysis put forward by Freud in his Studies on Hysteria (1895), The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), and his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905).

Having lost most of his family's wealth after the Russian Revolution, Pankejeff supported himself and his wife on his salary as an insurance clerk.

Facing a major crisis and not being able to get help from Mack Brunswick who had fled to Paris Pankejeff approached Muriel Gardiner who managed to get him a visa to travel there.

[11] Pankejeff would receive intermittent treatment for these episodes from various psychoanalysts, most frequently by the head of The Vienna Psychoanalytical Society Alfred von Winterstein and then by his successor, Wilhelm Solms-Rödelheim.

[14] Daniel Goleman wrote in 1990 in the New York Times: Freud's key intervention with the Wolf Man rested on a nightmare in which he was lying in bed and saw some white wolves sitting on a tree in front of the open window.

Freud's version of the supposed trauma, however, was contradicted by the Wolf Man himself, Sergej Pankejeff, in an interview with Karin Obholzer, a journalist who tracked him down in Vienna in the 1970s.

According to the authors, Pankejeff hid secrets concerning his older sister, and as the Wolf Man both wanted to forget and preserve these issues, he encrypted his older sister, as an idealised "other" in the heart of himself, and spoke these secrets out loud in a cryptic manner, through words hiding behind words, rebuses, wordplays etc.

The case forms a central part of the second plateau of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, titled "One or Several Wolves?"

In it, they repeat the accusation made in Anti-Oedipus that Freudian analysis is unduly reductive and that the unconscious is actually a "machinic assemblage".