The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction

Three The Sexual Animal and the Primal Scene of Birth

53 t h r e e The Sexual Animal and the Primal Scene of Birth The Wolf Man’s Afterlife and the Primal Scene of Birth If the case history popularly referred to by the animal nickname of his most famous patient, “the Wolf Man,” remains Freud’s most notorious clinical case, it is in part because it has never been closed.1 On the contrary: not only has this case resolutely resisted all forms of closure (clinical, theoretical , textual), but “the Wolf Man” also continues to thrive in what can only be described as an unprecedented clinical and textual afterlife. Since Freud first prematurely declared his patient “cured” in 1914, Wolf Man has both been the object of numerous clinical and theoretical papers in psychoanalysis (by Freud himself as well as by numerous others) and provided influential material for work in a wide variety of disciplines other than psychoanalysis, including philosophy, literary theory, literary criticism, art history, and studies in gender and sexuality.2 In his many returns, Wolf Man has continued to spawn new clinical approaches to psychoanalysis, new Marder-Ch03.indd 53 Marder-Ch03.indd 53 11/10/2011 4:02:39 PM 11/10/2011 4:02:39 PM 54 Psychoanalysis and the Maternal Function metapsychological theories, and new literary conceptions of topics ranging from narrative temporality to insights on dreams, fairy tales, and various forms of haunting, trauma, and failed mourning. Sergei Pankeiev, the biographical person behind the psychoanalytic construct “Wolf Man,” died in 1979 at the age of ninety-two after having survived two world wars, Nazi control of Austria, financial ruin, exile, and the suicides of his sister and his wife. He lived much of his long life, however, as “the Wolf Man,” having famously appropriated the persona of his psychoanalytic avatar for his own financial, libidinal, and professional ends, even choosing to write and publish his own memoirs under the hybrid animal name given to him by psychoanalysis rather than in his own name. During his long career as a psychoanalytic patient, “the Wolf Man” underwent multiple (and sometimes recurring) treatments: two analyses with Freud (the first conducted in 1910–1914 and the second in 1923), a follow-up analysis with Freud’s disciple Ruth Mack Brunswick (who originally published her account as “A Supplement to Freud’s ‘History of an Infantile Neurosis’” in 1928, and then subsequently supplemented her own supplement with a further update in 1945), and a parapsychoanalytic engagement with Muriel Gardiner (who in 1971 edited a volume under the title The Wolf Man by the Wolf Man in which his own autobiographical writings and personal reflections on his analytic history first appeared in English translation—unreadable for him—alongside Ruth Mack Brunswick’s clinical report as well as other documents pertaining to the case).3 The collection of texts in Muriel Gardiner’s edited volume also provided much of the primary source material for Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s provocative and innovative textually based clinical reassessment of the case that was first published in French as Le verbier de l’homme aux loups in 1976, and then again in an expanded English translation under the title The Wolf Man’s Magic Word in 1986—nearly a decade after the deaths of Abraham and of the patient known as Wolf Man. As we have already indicated in the previous two chapters, Abraham and Torok derive their radical reconception of failed mourning and the concept of the crypt (which they understand as a “magical” incorporation of an undead and unmourned other who becomes secretly entombed within the structure of the psyche) in large part through their retroactive reworking of untreated primal material from Freud’s case. Marder-Ch03.indd 54 Marder-Ch03.indd 54 11/10/2011 4:02:39 PM 11/10/2011 4:02:39 PM The Sexual Animal and the Primal Scene of Birth 55 As Abraham and Torok point out (and as all other readers of the case know well), Freud himself returned repeatedly and obsessively to the material in this case up until the very end. More or less explicit references to Wolf Man can be found in “The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales” (1913), “Fausse reconnaissance (Déjà Raconté) in Psychoanalytic Treatment” (1914), “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914), “Repression” (1915), “The Uncanny” (1919), Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926), “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), and the...