Abstract
Freud’s analysis of the Wolf Man was notoriously problematic, with this most famous patient resisting psychoanalytic interpretation and requiring attention from its practitioners for the duration of his long life. The case study, published in 1918, draws into its orbit the narratives of a neurotic personality and a dying class of Russian aristocracy, along with key theoretical assertions and political posturing (regarding the dissention of former colleagues) on the part of Freud. What the author locates in Freud’s text and the Wolf Man’s later memoirs and interviews is an exclusionary attitude, in both theory and personal reflections, to the very dramatic forces of world history that were to have a considerable impact on the lives of analyst and analysand. Using the related concepts of incorporation and the crypt developed in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s text The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, the author reconstructs this exclusion as both generative and disruptive of the Wolf Man’s engagement with, dependence on and resistance to psychoanalysis. Identifying a compromising and silenced dynamic regarding the Russian Revolution traced into the Wolf Man’s fragmented and uncertain identity, the author uses evidence of an irreconcilable subject position to inform a more cryptic understanding of the often bizarre attitudes, behaviour and language demonstrated by Freud’s patient. More than providing an answer to the Wolf Man’s pathology, this suggests instead a re-imagining of the case as an elusive, enigmatic and poetic work of symbolic mediation to which a similarly open and multiple interpretation is the only appropriate interpretative response.
Keywords:
- Keyword: Abraham and Torok
- Keyword: Historical Identity
- Keyword: revolution
- Keyword: The Crypt
- Keyword: The Wolf Man
How to Cite:
Goodwin, T., (2020) “Freud, the Wolf Man and the Encrypted Dynamism of Revolutionary History”, EJP import test SA.
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