The Wolf Man's burden

Abstract

The Wolf Man was Sigmund Freud's most famous case; his enigmatic childhood dream of being gazed at by wolves outside his bedroom window bedeviled the founder of psychoanalysis. A rich source of imagery and meaning, the Wolf Man case might be interpreted as the primal scene of psychoanalysis itself. This book regards the creation of the psychoanalytic case study as the writing of two lives -- those of the analysand and the analyst -- so Freud's own biography and subjective viewpoint could hardly fail to bear a direct influence on the institution of psychoanalysis. When Freud met the patient known later as the 'Wolf Man' psychoanalysis was already at an impasse because of Freud's inability at that time to work through repressed material from his own childhood. Freud overcame this impasse through a counter-transference that cast his patient in the role of a rival for the control of psychoanalysis writ large; his means for vanquishing this rival set the terms for Freud's legacy. The book offers a rigorous methodological framework for discussing the relationship between psychoanalytic writing and the lives of those who engage in it. The work of Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok, and Jacques Derrida in particular, are extended into the realm of Freud's own life. The result is psychobiography and psychoanalytical theory grounded firmly in historical lives.