ABSTRACT
"Personal peculiarities in the patient and a national character that was foreign to ours made the task of feeling one's way into his mind a laborious one," said Sigmund Freud of Pankeev in "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis," the primary published record of the case. Russian culture has always been full of nannies and grannies, at least since Pushkin's famous nanny, Arina Rodionovna. Her absurd image as the great poet's true muse, his inspiration and tutor, deeply infiltrated the mass consciousness of generations of Russian and Soviet schoolchildren. As the deadline that Freud had set for the completion of Pankeev's analysis approached, the patient began to produce more recollections of early childhood trauma. The impression that Freud made on Sergei Pankeev was strong enough to remain vivid even some forty years later when he described his first meeting with the famous psychotherapist. Pankeev's ambivalence seemed to Freud "extraordinarily clear, intense and protracted" and even "unbelievable."
