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58 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
malady to be brought under their treatment, rather than as a crime to be
punished by law. 51
The case of Sergeant Bertrand was also frequently cited as evidence
of the psychological origins of the werewolf myth, and as proof that
‘werewolves’ should be treated with compassion. Crowe, for example,
noted that Bertrand’s case had ‘excited considerable attention, especially
in the medical world’ and that ‘[t]he medical men interrogated
unanimously gave it as their opinion, that although in all other respects
perfectly sane, Bertrand was not responsible for these acts.’ 52
Despite locating the causes of lycanthropy ‘inside’ rather than
‘outside’, insanity was still a phenomenon that could be externalized
as something that happened to ‘others’, such as peasants (or, illogically,
madmen!) In the work of the anthropologist Tylor, however, the
psychologized understanding of lycanthropy posed more of a threat to
the ‘ideal’ subject of the Enlightenment. In keeping with the principles
of evolutionary theory, he extended his notion of ‘survival in culture’
to suggest that certain propensities deriving from an earlier stage of
development remain embedded within the human psyche. In a clear
foreshadowing of Carl Jung’s work on the collective unconscious, he
argued in Primitive Culture (1871) that
A poet of our own day has still much in common with the minds of
uncultured tribes in the mythologic stage of thought. The rude man’s
imaginations may be narrow, crude, and repulsive, while the poet’s more
conscious fictions may be highly wrought into shapes of fresh artistic
beauty, but both share in that sense of the reality of ideas. 53
Tylor’s implication that a shared psychological heritage had seeded
the human mind with instinctive drives was universally applicable and
threatened the self from the inside rather than the outside.
Now that the universal — masculine — self was brought into question,
masculinity began to be constructed as unstable, tenuous, and
in need of ‘psychic discipline’, 54 and the male werewolf was no longer
guaranteed his salvation. Increasingly, narratives about lycanthropy
explored the internal struggle for psychic control experienced by male
werewolves. As Sergeant Bertrand’s story was related by Alexander