Sexuality and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Criticisms

The Sexual Animal and the Primal Scene

121 The Sexual animal and the Primal Scene Elissa Marder although Freud’s most famous and most notoriously difficult case history From the History of an Infantile Neurosis has received extensive commentary, there is one important question that has attracted surprisingly little attention up until now. in this case, best known by its evocative hybrid name Wolf Man, animals populate virtually every page, but very little has been said about the status of the animal as such.1 indeed, it may be almost impossible to speak about the animal “as such”, precisely because the many animals and animal figures in the case operate at so many different and mutually exclusive levels of reality and psychic organization. There is, in fact, a vertiginous array of fauna, a veritable bestiary in the text. aside from the famous wolves, there are important references to sheep, sheep dogs, flies and beetles, caterpillars, snakes, horses, a wasp, goats, a fledgling bird, a giant caterpillar, a snail, and, finally, a swallowtail butterfly that, we discover, is a second animal incarnation of the same anxiety that produced the famous wolf dream. Some of these animals are representations that come from fairy tales and picture books, some are produced as dream-images, and some are animals encountered in the world. and some are animals that stand in for humans. in short, the animals are not always, or not simply, animals. more problematically still, it seems that animals can move from one status to another with remarkable flexibility. in the pages that follow, i hope to show how animal figures operate at every level of the case and intervene in its conceptual framework in complicated ways. indeed, i hope to demonstrate that animals occupy a critical, albeit somewhat obscure role in many, if not most, of the major theoretical issues raised by the case. These include the temporal status of the primal scene and the structure of Nachträglichkeit, the relationship between the primal scene and primal fantasies, the specificity of infantile sexuality, primal repression and the formation of the unconscious, castration and sexual difference, and 1 There are several important exceptions to this claim. most notably, Gilles deleuze and Félix Guattari have famously taken up Freud’s treatment of the number of the wolves in Wolf Man (deleuze & Guattari, 1987). also see: Genosko (1993) and tyler (2008). Figures_150810.indd 121 22/09/10 10:35 elissa marder 122 the grounds for establishing the distinction between instinct (Instinkt) and drive (Trieb).2 Before going any further, i want to make it clear from the outset that i am not arguing in favour of any continuity between the human and the animal realms. on the contrary, i hope to argue that, paradoxically, the animals in the text serve as strange indices to the very specificity of the human psyche. my aim in looking more closely at them is to bring the enigma of human sexuality and subjectivity more clearly into focus. Bizarrely, in what follows, it will emerge that one of the defining traits of being human is the incorporation of animal figures within the psyche; these internal animal figures are uncanny traces of our radical alterity and separation from animals. let me begin by returning to the famous primal scene itself. in an attempt to demonstrate the fundamental role played by infantile sexuality in individual psychic life, Freud dedicates his entire case to the derivation and discussion of the strange event known as “the primal scene”. as readers of Freud well know, the term “primal scene” refers to Freud’s reconstruction of an early, traumatic event: an act of coitus witnessed by the patient when he was too young to comprehend what he was seeing. on the basis of a subsequent childhood dream about wolves, analyzed as part of the treatment of the adult patient, Freud meticulously reconstitutes the existence of the traumatic event, the presumed date of its occurrence, and the precise details of the sexual content in the scene. in order to understand why this scene is so important for Freud, one should keep in mind that the precipitating event can never be recovered by memory because it occurred before the infant had developed the capacity either to remember it or to understand it. The dream that the child produces two and 2 in writing this paper, i have been greatly aware of the monumental contributions of Jean laplanche concerning the primal scene and with it, fantasy, seduction, sexuality and Nachtr äglichkeit. a longer version of...