“THE WOLF MAN”: PARADIGMATIC SHIFTS INTO THE NARRATIVE FANTASTIC
JOSHUA GOOCH
Rhetoric, Politics, Ethics Conference
University of Gent
12 February 2016
Tzvetan Todorov’s closing argument in The Fantastic are likely familiar enough to today’s
literary critics:
[Psychoanalysis] has replaced (and thereby made useless) the literature of the
fantastic. There is no need to resort to the devil in order to speak of an excessive
sexual desire, and none to resort to vampires in order to designate the attraction
exerted by corpses: psychoanalysis, and the literature which is directly or indirectly
inspired by it, deal with these matters in undisguised terms. 1
Speaking the unspeakable, or at least retranslating its symbolic import, is the perhaps the simplest
description of Freud’s talking cure, and Todorov’s point is quite simply that psychoanalysis has coopted the thematic enunciations of the fantastic. Yet I would hazard that in bringing Todorov’s
point to bear on Freud, one may find that psychoanalysis’ supplanting of the literature of the
fantastic reveals certain rhetorical intersections that explicate the hermeneutic structure of the
emergent model of psychoanalysis. My interest here is then not the shared thematics of the fantastic
but the shared structures of enunciation in these adjacent genres, though we will see quickly that the
relation of genre form to content is, in a word, over-determined. To this end, I have chosen the
Wolf Man case study, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” both for its elaborate narrative
form and its overall importance to Freud’s work, in order to draw out these parallels with Todorov’s
formulations.
First and foremost, we must clarify what figures psychoanalysis retains from the fantastic, or
perhaps more to the point, what exactly the fantastic is by Todorov’s definition. In Todorov’s
words:
The fantastic occupies the duration of […] uncertainty. Once we choose one answer
or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the
marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only
the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.2
That is, “The reader’s hesitation is therefore the first condition of the fantastic.” 3 As a structural
feature, the moment of hesitation is ostensibly drawn from Lovecraft. However, the claim that “the
fantastic is not situated within the work but in the reader’s individual experience”4 may also be seen
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as part and parcel with what Freud elaborates in “The Uncanny” as the author’s ability to “keep us
in the dark for a long time about the precise nature of the presuppositions on which the world he
writes about is based, or [he can cunningly and ingeniously avoid any definite information on the
point to the last.”5 Building upon this subdivision of hesitation, we might claim this second narrative
act, that is, the withholding of the information necessary for the proper construction of the text until
the last, is a concomitant feature of the fantastic. This withholding—a forestalling that allows the
fantastic to appear between the poles of the uncanny and the marvelous—also marks one of the
standard criticisms of Freud’s work, such as Stanley Fish’s typically pugnacious claim that Freud’s
reservations equal those of the Wolf man, and constitute an equivalent act of “anal eroticism.”6 And
one cannot forget Todorov’s term “pan-determinism,” defined as “a generalized causality which
does not admit the existence of chance and which posits that there are always direct relations among
all phenomena,” which may be readily correlated with Freud’s “over-determination” lifted here from
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and quoted within Todorov’s own text. 7 Thus, for our purposes
today, we will take these three pieces—hesitation, narrative withholding, and pan- or overdeterminism—as the important and constitutive structures of the fantastic to be traced in Freud’s
case study, if only for their explicit proleptic formulation by Freud himself.
In turning to “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” it is plain to see why someone
like Fish might find it impossible to extricate a discussion of the Wolf man from the case study’s
initial scant pages. Hence his claim that “most of the work of the case study has already been done,
for although we have yet to hear a single detail either of the analysand’s history or of his therapy, we
are already so much under Freud’s influence that when the details finally do appear, they will fall into
the places he has prepared for them.”89 What seems artificial in this is the presupposition of an
already rigidified hermeneutics of psychoanalysis, though it is clear from the first that Freud expects
the study to be understood as straddling two registers, the one a record of the particularities of
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therapy, and the other a theoretical polemic that elaborates and reifies the foundational concepts of
psychoanalysis. The narrative of the case study is thus always already a fight for space within extant
theory for the insertion of practice. That is, the case study as a genre functions as a work of therapy
acted in the midst of theoretical changes, a genre that is contradictorily dynamic and processual even
as it attempts to elaborate a closed analytic situation and foreclosed hermeneutic.10 The two registers
bind themselves inextricably as the record of treatment intertwines with that of therapy qua theory,
both undergoing a subsequent reification through the very process of inscription. Hence we cannot
believe this simply the battle for infantile sexuality that the title implies, but also a battle for its
appreciable after-effects. In terms of Todorov’s fantastic, this is the split between what he terms the
real and the imaginary, which for him is a question of whether the understanding or the perception
of an event is problematic. But more on that later.
Constructing the neurosis retroactively, then, is pivotal for the narrative’s temporal
construction and the analysand’s ability to convey—or indeed to retain—affect. Freud’s initial
attempt to defend this post-facto analysis hinges upon, as he puts it, the “many words and thoughts
[that] have to be lent to the child” for “the medium of recollection in an intellectually mature adult is
free from these limitations; but necessitates our taking into account the distortion and refurbishing
to which a person’s own past is subjected.”11 Distortion and refurbishing are precisely what is
instructive in the neurosis, for these constitute the integral processual machinations of the psyche as
such. Thus Freud’s analysis necessitates what narratologists understand as the interdependence of
fabula and sjuzhet to describe the structure of the psyche properly, leading to what one might call the
psyche’s aestheticization in its turn from bare record to literary object, that is, in the inextricability of
its content and form.12 The alternative, the narrative lent the child, is less acceptable for being all too
closely mediated by the analyst—Klein’s treatment of little Dick being the pre-eminent example of
this mediate and forceful turn toward the symbolic. Words thus take on material weight as they
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become the expression of affect. The readerly hesitation, that is, to quote Todorov, the first
condition of the fantastic thus may be simultaneously premised as the very hesitation incumbent
upon analysis itself, the disjunction of symbolic expression and intent as the analysand enters the
situation of analysis. Fish is right then to claim Freud’s influence is all-encompassing—the analysand
never speaks in this narrative but is always spoken for—yet a condition of the narrative’s
intelligibility is the intersection, or at least asymptotic confluence, of the analysand’s symbolic logic
and the analyst’s. The presentation of the Wolf man’s case is from the beginning enrapt by Freud’s
hermeneutic, which is to say implicitly over-determined by the narrative of psychoanalysis itself.
However, whether as pan- or over-determinism, this only leads us only to another commonplace of
narrative: that it may interpellate its subject, in this case the subject of psychoanalysis par excellence.
But this interpellation in the context of the treatment is altogether meaningless unless the subject
actively recognizes himself in this interpellation. And just who is the subject here? The Wolf man?
The analyst? The reader?
To answer that question, let us turn to another subdivision of the narrative, the tripartite
division of the Wolf man’s neurosis: that is, first, the infantile neurosis as it antedates the adult,
second, the adult neurosis as interdependent with yet also independent of the infantile, and, third, and
perhaps most central and elusive, the analytic construction of the relation between them. Somewhat
like Bergson’s cone of consciousness in Matter and Memory, no? The question, then, is whether this
analytic construction is that of a totalizing narrative of constitutive foreclosure or the traversing of
the interstitial gap of subjectivity. While the infantile and adult neuroses related by the Wolf man
have some phenomenal status, the third division, that of the analytic intertext, stands as an
everywhere that is nowhere, bringing the various narratives together to create the subject of the case
study, what we might call the Wolf man qua Wolf man, the interpellated analytic subject. Navigating
these variously intended ends thus becomes the crux of hesitation through a kind of readerly anxiety
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about the hermeneutic foreclosure exercised by the case study itself. Just as in the fantastic, in the
case study a hesitation is located within the reader as Freud winds these phenomenal strands into
one ephemeral thread, woven through the woof of record and polemic.
To further complicate matters, Freud collapses the chronology of treatment with that of the
neuroses, in effect redeploying the collapse that created the analytic subject in the analytic intertext,
but now as an atemporal amendment clearing space for the unconscious. Neither chronology
matters much except insofar as it may be fitted to the narrative necessities of Freud’s polemic—for
example, the withholding of “the child’s first gift” until the seventh section.13 Freud’s inability “to
give either a purely historical or a purely thematic account of [the] patient’s story” forces him to
admit the combination of “the two methods of presentation” as “no means [have] been found of in
any way introducing into the reproduction of an analysis the sense of conviction which results from
the analysis itself.”14 At best, he claims he may only “bring forward some new facts for investigators
who have already been convinced by their own clinical experience.”15 That is, he may only speak to
those who have in some way already been spoken for. Like the Wolf man himself, the text
interpellates the readers as similarly subdued subjects of psychoanalysis, though the gap that forms
the Wolf man as an analyzable subject is here more nebulous. The reader must be defined in order
for the proper hesitation to be elicited, and it is through this attempt at definition that Freud gains a
detour into the technicalities of treatment. The maneuver forces one to relinquish any normalizing
attribution of chronology to the description of the neuroses or their interrelation. Temporality
becomes a kind of affect of neurosis, something analysis may only address by returning each of the
individual phenomenal moments to their original atemporal, atomistic status, or perhaps more
succinctly, already related back to the already closed and completed moment of analysis as the very
proof of neurosis itself.
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Freud draws the relation of this ahistoric textual creation to therapeutic method via the
unconscious, claiming the analyst “must behave as ‘timelessly’ as the unconscious itself,”16 a
reference to the analyst’s use of the unconscious in treatment as what he elsewhere terms “a
receptive organ” to be used “as an instrument in the analysis.”17 The timelessness of the treatment as
it is narrativized becomes a rhetorical strategy for achieving narrative assent via an interpellative
form of transference. One might even call this atemporality one of the foundational conditions of
narrative legibility. After all, why do we read synchronically in any textual analysis? And, as such, the
atemporal mode of narration, its retrospective form, functions as the gap through which the reader
gains a sort of subject position. One might even say the problem of the genre of the case study
results from its roots in the fantastic. That is, as the necessary hesitation also marks its inability to
convey that “sense of conviction which results from the analysis” even as the conviction of its
readers remains the implicit goal. Never mind the case study’s broadly announced intention as an
account of “new facts for investigators who have already been convinced.” Indeed, the very status
of these investigators is what is really at stake: mere pages before, the case study quite broadly
positions itself as an argument between “libidinal motive forces” and “remote cultural aims”18–in
other words, between Freud’s position of the primacy of the particularized experience of infantile
sexuality against that of phylogeny and Jung’s version to the contrary. The “investigators who have
already been convinced” are thus precisely those most in need of convincing. The doubling and
redoubling of the narrative strategy itself embeds this supposed ambivalence in a particular discourse
always already closed and shaped by the ended act of transference within analysis. That is, the Wolf
man as empirical evidence. More broadly, the enacting of the problems of transference are not
merely experienced within analysis but also the within the textual, thus enacting transference on a
second level between the reader and Freud, a reenactment of the transference of analysis through
displacement into the textual.19 Freud’s atemporal narrativity, his authorly synchrony, while in one
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respect opening the way to the therapeutic use of the analyst’s unconscious, also stands as the
impacted overcoding of chronology as such, offering us at once the sublimated categories of the
Wolf man’s recollected chronology, the analyst’s reconstructed chronology, and the chronology of
the analysis. The reader’s hesitation can only be further increased by the difficulty of achieving any
sense of narrative flow in this oddly Bergsonian narrative structure. That is, we’re neither the point
of the cone or its base, but the model as a whole, as viewed from the exterior. As Freud moves further
from linear narrativity toward an atemporal map of the Wolf man’s psychical processes, then, the
reader finds himself forced into an impossible choice: either accept Freud’s construction as a whole
or attempt to tease the text apart moment by atomized moment.
What we’re confronted with, then, is a model of narrative based on the notion of
transference, one which traverses the theoretical/therapeutic axis while mapping the transference of
the therapy atop the transference of the argument. Freud’s re-creation of the analytic narrative of the
neurosis and his polemic narrative of infantile sexuality ensures that, though all points should
converge upon the Wolf man as narrator and narratee, they converge instead upon Freud. This
disjunction destabilizes the center of the text, for the substitutive sleight of hand blurs the limits that
demarcate the Wolf man’s story and Freud’s own. We might note here one of Todorov’s conditional
conditions for the fantastic, that of an identification with a character in the diegesis, one bearing an
ontological similitude to that of the reader. If there is no such certainty as regards the Wolf man, for
Freud there should be no such problem. Indeed, Freud’s brief sketch of the chronology of analysis
serves as the deceptive (interpellative) frame-narrative for the analysis proper, and here’s the twist: to
overcome the Wolf man’s “shrinking from an independent existence”20 Freud “[waited] until his
attachment […] had become strong enough to counterbalance this shrinking, and then played this
one factor off against the other,”21 issuing in “all the information […] which enabled me to
understand his infantile neurosis [in] this last period of work.”22 Freud thus activates narrative
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transference through therapeutic transference. That is, therapeutic transference provides the frame
from which the case study itself issues. And it does this through a series of identifications across
textual levels—diegetically between Freud and the Wolf man, and intertextually between Freud and
his (analyst) readers. In this cycling of transference, the Wolf man should be understood as caught in
the process of reflective and retroactive narrativizing via identification: Narrative fact is an overdetermined amalgam of what was spoken, echoed, probed for affect, and re-spoken, all without
effect until “the disproportionately short time [in which] the analysis produced all the material which
made it possible to clear up his inhibitions and remove his symptoms.”23 Years are focalized through
this single period, overlaying the chronology of the case study with a momentous present, if you will.
So while the ostensible frame of analysis fulfills a reference to “real life”—or at least
existence outside analysis, Todorov’s “real” that may not be properly understood —the polemic
frame instead offers reference to a second sense of reality, that is the perception of psychoanalytic
theory, a problem of perception as one of linguistics, that “distortion” and “refurbishing” described
earlier. This is the “third peculiarity” of the Wolf man’s case, for Freud’s "difficulty in deciding to
make a report upon [the case]" was not because "its results have coincided […] with our previous
knowledge" but because "many details […] seemed to me myself to be so extraordinary and
incredible that I felt some hesitation in asking other people to believe in them.”24 The already known
within psychoanalysis stands as the boundary or perceptual frame reference of Freud’s theoretical
work. Here one can see the ability of psychoanalysis to perceive itself under attack. The existence of
the “extraordinary and incredible” available to Freud via this case constitutes a conflict with
psychoanalytic perception, a case of the frame-narrative retelling or re-viewing the frame,
precipitating an authorly hesitation to mirror the reader’s.
Chronology thus decays under the weight of the perceptual contradictions in the Wolf man’s
filtered recollections. As Freud describes it, “whether these contradictory sorts of attitudes towards
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animals were really in operation simultaneously, or whether they did not more probably replace one
another, but if so in what order and when—to all these questions his memory could offer no
decisive reply.”25 The Wolf man’s inability to organize these recollections out of the atemporal
amalgam of the unconscious marks the activation of analysis as such, and the task laid out, then, is
the ordering of memory to follow the logic of analysis. That is, rather than a normalizing temporal
logic, one instead consubstantial with Freud’s theoretical polemic. The relation to the framenarratives as indicators of liminality, whether of real life misunderstood or psychoanalytic theory
misperceived, casts the whole of the narrative into hesitation, a text made hermeneutically
impossible by the uncertain priority of the frame and enframed narratives. Indeed, even the
problems of the case study remain peripheral and obscure, hence an early closing paragraph to
clarify the problems for analysis: the origin of the change in character, the resultant obsessive piety,
the significance of his phobias and perversities. Freud often returns to these faux chronologies,
using questions to tease out new proto-narratives as narrative re-enactments of the analytic
transference, the wrestling of facts between analyst and analysand played out between author and
reader. The proto-narratives, as super-structural extensions of the frame-narratives, re-encompass all
the various points in our provisional chart, a thematic narrativizing that overrides any semblance of
temporal structure and returns us to the atemporal narrative of the closed analysis. The protonarrative functions as the over-coding of the primary patient narrative with the analytic, a redoubling
of the palimpsest transference narrative. Freud explicates the structural importance of these protonarratives to psychoanalysis in the case study’s third section:
There is no danger at all in communicating constructions of this kind to the
person under analysis; they never do any damage to the analysis if they are
mistaken; but at the same time they are not put forward unless there is some
prospect of reaching a nearer approximation to the truth by means of them.26
These constructions provide the analysand a prospective re-narrativatization of his desire to accept
or reject on the basis of affect. This is essentially the talking cure: the analysand’s response to the
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proto-narrative should be a lessening of the symptom. Freud, however, abandons this model as the
revelation of affect proved inadequate even to the treatment of the symptom, moving instead to the
transference model where trauma is reworked in analytic space, a process described in the
“Dynamics of Transference” essay of 1912:
The patient ascribes, just as in dreams, currency and reality to what results
from the awakening of his unconscious feelings; he seeks to discharge his
emotions, regardless of the reality of the situation. The physician requires of
him that he shall fit these emotions into their place in the treatment and in
his life-history, subject them to rational consideration, and appraise them at
their true psychical value. This struggle between physician and patient,
between intellect and the forces of instinct, between recognition and the
striving for discharge, is fought out almost entirely over the transferencemanifestations. This is the ground on which victory must be won, the final
expression of which is lasting recovery from neurosis.27
Freud’s two methodologies overlap during the Wolf man’s treatment until the conclusion makes
clear all progress was accomplished in transference. Indeed, the Wolf man’s initial treatment, begun
in 1910 and ended in the winter of 1914, locates this case study in the center of this crucial
therapeutic change, for it is only when Freud steps into the role of the father, threatening to end
treatment, does the Wolf man enter fully into the therapeutic process.28 The proto-narrative, then, is
also the very shifting ground of therapeutic praxis, and the battleground of psychoanalytic theory
itself. The hesitation of the text, then, over-determined as it is, is thus between perceptual theoretical
problems and ontological affect tracing ones, a problem only resolved by recourse to Oedipus. But
that is a different, and much longer story, outside the purview of today’s discussion.
Thus, in this brief treatment of the confluences of the fantastic with the psychoanalytic case
study—what I would like to call structurally, rather than thematically, adjacent genres—I hope we’ve
seen that while the literature of psychoanalysis may not “need to resort to demons to speak of an
excessive sexual desire,” it certainly has not lost the need to hesitate.
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END NOTES
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: a Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard, (Cleveland: Press of
Western Reserve University, 1973), 160.
1
2
Ibid., 25.
3
Ibid., 31.
4
Ibid., 34.
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume 17,
(London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 251.
5
Stanley Fish, “Withholding the Missing Portion: Power, Meaning and Persuasion in Freud’s The Wolf Man,” The
Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature, (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1987), 166.
6
7
Ibid., 161.
9
Ibid., 160.
That the Wolf man never manages to extricate himself successfully from therapy suggests that this symbolic narrative
structure in some way managed to infect the Wolf man’s psyche so deeply that it was actually impossible for him to
cease being interpellated as a psychoanalytic subject.
10
Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, volume 17, (London: Hogarth Press, 1955) 8-9.
11
Peter Brooks wants to discuss this case study entirely in these terms, as they align closely with his reading of detective
stories as narrative reconstructions divided upon these narratological lines. The interchangeability of the narratives,
however, and the innate instability of the terms themselves render this approach unusable. His divisions, while similar to
ones I will propose, are seen as being alternately available to the sjuzhet whenever the case study deems it suitable. There
is interrelation but a disturbing lack of conflict, and I do not believe it fully accounts for the multiplicity of narratives at
play.
12
13
C.f. Fish 166-170
14
Freud, “From,” 13.
15
Ibid., 13.
16
Ibid., 10.
17
Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytic Method of Treatment,” Therapy and Technique, trans. James Strachey, (New York:
Collier Books, 1978), 122.
18
Freud, “From,” 9.
This theory of dual levels of transference would answer Fish’s assertion that “one is tempted then to say that the story
Freud tells is doubled by the story of the telling or that his performance mirrors or enacts the content of the analysis. In
fact it is the other way around; the content of the analysis mirrors or enacts the drama of the performance, a drama that
is already playing itself out long before it has anything outside itself to be ‘about’, and playing itself out in the very terms
of the preservation and concealing of masculine self-esteem and aggression” (163). In asserting different active levels of
19
11
transference within the narrative, the case study retains a certain cohesion lost by forcing Freud’s narrative into the single
category of the rhetorical simply on the basis of this author/reader transference.
20
Freud, “From,” 11.
21
Ibid., 11.
22
Ibid., 11.
23
Ibid., 11.
24
Ibid., 12.
25
Ibid., 16.
26
Ibid., 19.
27
Sigmund Freud, “Dynamics of Transference,” trans. James Strachey, (XX:XX), 114.
28
Wolf-Man, The Wolf-Man, ed. Muriel Gardiner, (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 83.
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