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68 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
part of the child (if not the grown man) — folkloric resonances which
Freud missed because he was unacquainted with the Russian cultural
milieu of his patient. Connecting the dream with his own work on the
benandanti (literally ‘good-doers’), a sixteenth- and early-seventeenthcentury
sect whose members claimed to sally forth in spirit periodically
(often in wolf-form) to fight witches and warlocks for a prosperous
harvest, Ginzburg points out that the Wolf-Man’s dream was similar
to the initiatory dream or vision experienced by noviciates in the
Baltic and Slavic versions of this practice. 10 He suggests that the Wolf-
Man was probably exposed to beliefs emanating from these traditions
through contact with his nurse or njanja, a Russian peasant, adding
weight to his argument by recalling that the Wolf-Man was born with
the caul on Christmas Day 11 (both the caul and the Christmas birth
being traditional indications of the potential for lycanthropy). 12 One
might add to Ginzburg’s evidence the observation that the Wolf-Man
was also born with what Muriel Gardiner (an American psychoanalyst,
once a student of Freud’s in Vienna) described as a ‘hereditary taint’ 13
— red hair, a traditional indicator of an affinity with the supernatural
world. As Ginzburg therefore argues, ‘The case of the wolf-man poses
forcefully that interweaving of myths and neuroses which so engrossed
Freud and Jung, albeit from different points of view.’ 14 The point of his
study is not ‘to explain the neuroses of the wolf-man by the myth of the
werewolves’; rather, Ginzburg demonstrates the pervasive presence of
myth in our society and culture, chasing its shadow as it slips in and
out of the narratives presented by books of fairy tales, the Wolf-Man
and his njanja, Freud, and Ginzburg himself. 15 In this sense, Ginzburg’s
‘myth’ operates in a similar fashion to Slavoj Žižek’s ‘spectrality’,
completing the circle of reality.
Certainly, the name Freud used to protect his patient’s identity had
the effect of linking Pankejeff’s story with a tradition of lycanthropy,
especially in the context of a culture which was on the brink of transferring
the horrors of the werewolf to a medium as culturally pervasive
and influential as film (The Werewolf of London appeared in 1935,
The Wolf Man in 1941). With the advent of the cinematic Wolf Man,
Freud’s case has become increasingly stigmatized by its title; Ginz-