The Palace of Broken Mirrors: Sergei Through Four Lenses and Two Plateaus

(A story about the Wolf Man and his interpreters)

The gray snow of Vienna, in 1926, clung to Sergei Pankejeff’s boots like an old remorse. He was no longer the young Russian aristocrat who had arrived decades earlier at Berggasse 19, consumed by phobias and the specter of white wolves hovering over a Christmas tree. He was a middle-aged man, the marks of time and melancholy deep on his face, carrying with him not only the battered suitcase but the inextricable burden of having become the Wolf Man – a case, an enigma, a sacred text of nascent psychoanalysis. This time, however, his analytical pilgrimage would not be limited to the dark, antiquities-filled consulting room of Professor Freud. Fate itself, or perhaps a cruel irony of the unconscious, would lead him through a labyrinth of interpretations, where his primal dream would be dissected by four brilliant and radically distinct minds.

First Mirror: The Archaeologist of the Soul – Sigmund Freud (1926, Berggasse 19)

The air in the consulting room was dense, infused with the scent of cigars, aged leather, and Egyptian statue dust. Freud, older now, his graying beard meticulously trimmed, eyes behind thin-rimmed glasses as penetrating as scalpels, observed Sergei. The divan was a fragile ship sailing through stormy psychic seas.

"So, Herr Pankejeff," Freud’s voice was deep, calm, "does the shadow of the Christmas pine still haunt you? Do the wolves continue to watch, silent?"

Sergei squirmed on the divan as if the physical memory hurt him. "Yes, Herr Professor. Less frequent, but... the intensity. The terror of being devoured by those bright, unmoving eyes in the dark... and the window opening by itself... the cold wind..." His voice faded into a whisper.

Freud leaned forward, fingers intertwined. "Let’s return to the core, the Urszene, the primal scene. Your insistence on seeing it as factual reality... but that is not what it is about, is it? It is about fantasy, Herr Pankejeff, the traumatic inscription of a forbidden desire, furiously repressed by the infantile superego." He paused dramatically, lighting a cigar. The match crackled like a small thunderclap. "The desire for the mother, the rage against the rival father, the paralyzing guilt. The wolves... are him. The father. The object of your fear and your unconscious desire for elimination. Their immobility? The anguished expectation of the satisfaction of the Oedipal wish, or its punishment. The window that opens? The portal to trauma, to the scene of parental relations your infantile mind distorted into something monstrous."

Sergei felt a chill run down his spine. The interpretation was familiar, but its logical force, its ability to reduce the vivid nightmare to an equation of drives, still haunted him. It was as if Freud were excavating his brain with a spade, unearthed psychic fossils with unrelenting precision. "But the details, Herr Professor... the whiteness of the wolves... the tree..."

"Significant details," Freud interrupted. "The whiteness: the snow of Russia, the bed linens, the purity of the mother corrupted? The Christmas tree: the phallic symbol, the celebration masking the family tension? It all converges, Herr Pankejeff. Everything points to the unresolved Oedipal conflict, whose tendrils strangle your psychic life to this day. The treatment is to persist in remembering, in free association, until the cathectic energy trapped in this complex is released and reintegrated." The smoke from the cigar formed rings in the heavy air, like thoughts taking shape.

Second Mirror: The Ego Surgeon – Ruth Mack Brunswick (1927, A Brighter Consulting Room)

Two years later, in a brighter, less oppressive, yet still intense consulting room, Sergei met Ruth Mack Brunswick. A close disciple of Freud, but with her own clinical eyes, sharp for the fissures in the ego. She was younger, her energy more contained, but her intelligence was a luminous focus.

"Sergei," she began, dispensing with formalities, "Professor Freud explored the territory of the id, the deep unconscious where the dream of the wolves was born. But you came to me because the ground of your present reality is still mined, isn’t it? The depressions, relational difficulties, this sense of... falseness, of not being whole."

Sergei nodded, relieved that someone saw beyond the famous dream. "Yes, Dr. Brunswick. It’s as if I live in the shadow of that dream, but the present... the present is a barren landscape."

Ruth tilted her head, studying him. "Freud uncovered the volcanic origin, but the continuous eruption deformed the landscape of your ego. I see in you, Sergei, not only the aftermath of childhood neurosis but a borderline struggle – a fragility in ego structure, difficulty maintaining boundaries between self and other, between fantasy and reality." She paused. "The dream of the wolves was the initial earthquake. But the aftershocks? Your transferential relationship with Freud, for instance. Intense, ambivalent... almost delirious in its dependence and then rejection. Did you not cling to him as a savior? And then, in your anger, turn him into a pursuer?"

Sergei blushed. It was true. "And the wolves... how do you see the dream now?"

"The wolves," Ruth answered with surgical clarity, "are indeed representations of the father and the primal scene, as Freud postulated. But their immobility, their hypnotic gaze... also speaks of your psychic paralysis in the face of conflict. They speak of your difficulty in integrating aggressive and libidinal drives in an adaptive way. Treatment, Sergei, must focus on the here and now, on strengthening the ego, on elaborating current object relations – including ours. We need to repair the structural damage caused by the original trauma and the fragile defenses you have erected." Her voice was firm, an antidote to Sergei’s depressive fog. She saw the cracks in the foundation that Freud had located underground.

Third Mirror: The Decoder of the Symbolic – Jacques Lacan (1952, Paris, Auster Apartment)

Paris, decades later. The war had passed, leaving scars deeper than Sergei’s. The man who entered Jacques Lacan’s minimalist apartment was an even more worn-out specter. Lacan, magnetic, intense, his dark eyes burning with intellectual fire, seemed more like a high priest than a doctor.

"Bonjour, Sergei," Lacan greeted, his voice an instrument of precision and ambiguity. The atmosphere was thick with tobacco and dense concepts. There was no divan, only two chairs facing each other – a duel of signifiers. "So, the infamous dream of the white wolves. The casus belli of Freudian psychoanalysis. But Freud, mon cher, got stuck in the imaginary, in the domesticated Oedipal drama. He sought an ultimate meaning, a biographical truth. A fundamental error."

Sergei felt displaced. "What then, Dr. Lacan?"

"The Real!" Lacan exclaimed, gesturing. "The dream is a message from the Other, written in the language of the unconscious, which is structured like a language. The wolves are not things, they are not literal representations of the father or mother. They are pure signifiers! 'Wolf' – loup – a signifier that captured you, Sergei, that constituted you as a divided subject." Lacan stood up, began to walk. "The immobility of the wolves? The fixed gaze? This is the objet petit a in its rawest form! The object-cause of desire, unattainable, that paralyzes us with its terrible fascination. The window that opens by itself? The intrusion of the Real, the impossible to fully symbolize – the parental sexual scene, yes, but not as an event, and as a hole in the symbolic fabric."

Lacan stopped in front of Sergei, his piercing gaze. "The dream is not about what happened, Sergei. It’s about desire and its structuring by language. The 'Wolf Man' is an effect of the signifier 'wolf' in your unconscious associative chain. Your suffering comes from being trapped in this symbolic network, alienated in the desire of the Other (parents, Freud, psychoanalysis itself!). The cure? It is not to recall, it is to reread the text of the unconscious. It is to cross the fantasy that the signifier 'wolf' wove around this hypnotic and terrifying object a. It is to accept that desire is always the desire of the Other, and find a less paralyzing way to deal with this structural lack." The interpretation was a whirlwind, dematerializing Sergei’s concrete experience into pure linguistic structure and ontological lack.

Fourth Mirror: The Hunter of Letters – Serge Leclaire (1968, A Studio Lit by Desk Lamps)

Years later, in another Parisian consulting room, this time more welcoming, lit by lamps creating pools of light, Sergei met Serge Leclaire. A Lacanian psychoanalyst, but with a unique sensitivity to the body and the drive. Leclaire had a more contemplative air, less oracular than Lacan.

"Sergei," Leclaire began, his voice soft contrasting with the density of his ideas, "Lacan taught us about the signifier. But the dream of the wolves... it is more than a network of signifiers. It is an inscription. A traumatic inscription in the speaking body."

He grabbed a block of paper and a thick pastel pencil. "Imagine," he drew strong, almost violent abstract lines, "the brute force of the drive. Pure, undifferentiated energy, unbearable for the infantile psyche." He drew concentric circles over the lines. "Then comes the work of the dream, of fantasy. It tries to connect this drive, to give it form, a script. The wolves in the tree... it is a figuration." He darkened some points in the drawing, creating shadows. "But look, Sergei, this figuration is fragile, insufficient. The death drive – Thánatos – insists. It rips through the fabric of fantasy. The terrifying immobility of the wolves? It is the trauma of the drive itself interrupting the imagined scene. It is the unspeakable, the unfigurably, making an irruption."

Leclaire looked at Sergei with intellectual compassion. "The dream is not just about desire (Freud) or the signifier (Lacan). It is about the titanic struggle to embody the drive, to find a ‘letter’ – a unary trait, a primordial signifier – that can, minimally, support its devastating charge. 'Wolf' was the desperate attempt of your infantile unconscious. But this letter became stained, Sergei. Stained by the excessive drive it tried to contain. Your life has been an attempt to find other ‘letters’, other ways of inscribing this excess without being destroyed by it. The analytical work now is to pursue these other inscriptions, these subtler, less catastrophic drive traces, that will allow life to continue, despite the black hole that the Real of the drive insists on keeping open." Leclaire saw the bloody battle at the most elemental level of the psyche, where flesh meets symbol.

Interstice

The snow of Vienna, Sergei Pankejeff’s eternal companion, now mixed with the soot and frenzy of Paris, the late 1970s. The world had turned upside down many times since his encounters with Freud, Brunswick, Lacan, and Leclaire. He was an old man now, but the ghost of the white wolves, now overlain by the interpretive layers of his analysts, still hovered, no longer as a sharp terror, but as a heavy mist of stagnant meaning. A friend, a philosophy student, insisted: "Sergei, you need to meet these two, Deleuze and Guattari. They’re talking about desire in a way that… that blows everything up. Maybe they’ll blow up your wolves too."

That’s how Sergei found himself in front of a door in a modest building in the Quartier Latin, behind which an intellectual energy as dense as the smoke of Gauloises escaping through the cracks was seething.

Plateau 1: The Chaotic Bookstore – Meeting with Félix Guattari (1977, An Anarchist Bookstore)

The first meeting was with Félix Guattari, not in a consulting room, but amidst the creative chaos of a small anarchist bookstore he frequented as a second office. Guattari, an electric figure, quick gestures, eyes shining with restless and practical intelligence, surrounded by pamphlets, books open in several languages, and a group of young people discussing fervently.

"Ah! The Wolf Man!" Guattari exclaimed, not with the reverence of a clinical case, but with the interest of an ethologist encountering a rare species. "Sergei, isn’t it? Come, come! Ignore the mess. Mess is productive!" He dragged two chairs to a slightly less crowded corner, near a pile of books on schizoanalysis and communal gardens.

Sergei immediately felt displaced from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the previous consults. Here, one breathed free air, even within four walls covered in shelves. "You... know about my case?" Sergei asked, hesitant.

"Know? Freud, Lacan... the whole psychoanalytic industry built a monument about you, my dear!" Guattari laughed, a hoarse and sincere sound. "A monument to Oedipus, to the master-signifier, to the unconscious as a theater of shadows! But we, with Gilles, are interested in something else: the unconscious as a factory, Sergei! As a producer of pure desire, before it is captured, organized, repressed by the family, society, and psychoanalysis itself!"

Sergei’s eyes widened. "Pure desire? But the wolves... the terror..."

"Terror? Yes, sure!" Guattari agreed, lighting another cigarette. "But terror is an effect, not the cause! Look what they did to your desire, Sergei. Freud reduced it to mommy-daddy-baby, a miniature Greek tragedy. Lacan locked you in a language cage, where you can only bark the desire of the Other! But your dream... those white, motionless, hypnotic wolves... that’s power! Intense power, blocked!"

Guattari leaned forward, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Imagine the wolves not as figures of the father or signifiers. Imagine them as pure affects! A swarm of sensations: the blinding white, the sharp cold of the open window, the deafening silence, the paralyzing immobility. This is desire before being told an Oedipal story! It’s an agencement of forces, a desire machine working at full speed... and then BAM! Captured. Codified as ‘primal scene,’ ‘castration,’ ‘phallus’! Your desire was territorialized in that family drama, and you became stuck, like a broken record, repeating the neurosis."

Sergei felt a different kind of cold. Not the old terror, but a vertigo of possibility. "So... the wolves aren’t a problem to be interpreted?"

"Interpreted? No! Experienced again! But differently!" Guattari slammed the table, knocking some books off. "We need to deterritorialize your desire, Sergei! Let it loose from the Oedipal and signifying chains! Maybe the wolves are a machine of speed and hunting, trapped in immobility. Maybe the white is a light for something new, not a ghost from the past. You need to find lines of flight! Build bodies without organs where these intensities can flow without getting stuck in that miserable script of guilt and fear!"

Plateau 2: The Nomadic Apartment – Meeting with Gilles Deleuze (1978, A Studio with Maps on the Walls)

A few weeks later, Sergei was received by Gilles Deleuze in his apartment-studio. The air was more contained than Guattari’s, but no less intense. Walls covered with geological maps, diagrams of carnivorous plants, sketches of expressive faces. Deleuze, with his thick glasses and deep concentration, seemed like a cartographer of unknown inner worlds.

"Sergei Pankejeff," Deleuze said, his voice soft yet sharp with precision. "Félix told me about our meeting. Fascinating. You are a true involuntary rhizome." He pointed to a complex diagram on the wall, intertwined roots forming a network with no center. "Freud, Lacan, the others... they tried to make you a tree. A single root (Oedipus, the ‘wolf’ signifier) from which all your suffering branches. But you... you are more like this." He touched the rhizome on the map. "Multiplicity. Lateral, subterranean, unpredictable connections."

Deleuze walked slowly, as if thinking with his feet. "Your dream of the wolves is not a window to an original trauma. It’s a plateau of intensity. A moment when a constellation of forces – visual (the white, the eyes), auditory (the silence, the wind), kinesthetic (the immobility, the potential fall) – reached an unsustainable level of condensation and crystallized into that terrible image. The wolves are the body that this plateau of affects found to express itself. Not its cause."

Sergei felt the conceptual ground shake beneath his feet. "But why wolves? Why that body?"

"By chance? By resonance? Because Russian culture has wolves? Because you saw an illustrated book?" Deleuze shrugged. "The final ‘why’ is less important than the how and the what. How does this image work in you? It paralyzes (as Lacan saw, but attributing it to the signifier). It reduces your world to a single point of terror. It’s a molar image, heavy, totalizing. What Félix and I propose is a micropolitics of desire. Instead of fixing on this molar image, on the wolves as a unit of horror, break it apart."

Deleuze stopped in front of Sergei, his eyes magnified by his glasses seemed to see through him. "Decompose the plateau. The white: it may be the snow of childhood, but also the blank canvas to paint something new? The fixed gaze: it may be terror, but also extreme attention, fascination for something that does not yet exist? The immobility: paralysis, but also accumulated potential energy, like a spring? The open window: the intrusion of the Real, but also a line of flight, a passage out of that suffocating room?"

He paused, letting the questions echo. "Your path, Sergei, is no longer deep interpretation, the search for the lost origin. It’s experimentation. Creating new agencements. Connecting to other things: music? Gardening? A collective? Anything that allows the intensities trapped in that molar image of the wolves – the intensity of the white, the gaze, the silence – to find new channels, new bodies to inhabit. To become a wolf? No. To become imperceptible, fluid, able to inhabit multiple plateaus of sensation without getting stuck in any. It’s a cure not by understanding, but by mutation, by the continuous creation of new modes of existence."

Epilogue: The Garden of Agencements

Sergei Pankejeff didn’t become a militant schizoanalyst. Nor did he find a miraculous cure. But something fundamental changed within the palace of broken mirrors.

Sitting in a small community garden on the outskirts of Paris, where he now spent afternoons tending aromatic herbs, Sergei looked at a chamomile bed. The white flowers danced lightly in the wind. White. Not the static, hypnotic, and terrifying white of the wolves. A multiple, vibrant white, connected to the green of the leaves, the soft aroma, the warmth of the sun on his neck, the distant sound of children playing.

He thought of Deleuze’s maps, Guattari’s productive chaos. The wolves hadn’t disappeared. But they had deterritorialized. They were no longer a monolithic statue of terror at the center of his psyche. They were now particles of sensation – a fragment of white here, a shadow of immobility there, an echo of silence over here – that could connect to other things. The touch of moist earth (against paralysis), the intense smell of thyme (against the emptiness of silence), the constant movement of ants (against immobility).

Freud had given him a narrative. Lacan, a structure. Ruth, an ego diagnosis. Leclaire, a pulsional battle. Deleuze and Guattari gave him a toolkit and a map of the territory of desire as production, not lack. They didn’t analyze him; they invited him to experiment with himself.

The dream of the wolves was no longer the gravitational center of his existence. It was a plateau among others, a momentary crystallization of forces that could be undone and redone. The cure, he realized, wasn’t to decipher the past enigma but to weave, incessantly, new agencements in the present. To become a gardener of his own desire, where the seeds of the past, stripped of their fatal script, could sprout into unforeseen forms, connected to the vast and unpredictable rhizome of life.

The Wolf Man breathed deeply, the aroma of earth and herbs filling his lungs. For the first time in decades, the air didn’t smell of old snow or the dust of psychoanalytic archives. It smelled of possibility. And in a remote corner of his mind, the white wolves, free from the function of monsters or signifiers, seemed to finally rest, slowly dissolving in the multicolored flow of becoming.