The Curse of the Wer.. - Site de Thomas - Free

I USED TO BE A WEREWOLF
his patient Sergei Pankejeff the alias of ‘Wolf-Man’, Freud was almost
certainly drawing on narratives which juxtaposed the contending
demands of the ‘primitive’ and the ‘civilized’ in the human personality,
a view that is borne out by his description of ‘the contrast between the
[Wolf-Man’s] agreeable and affable personality, his acute intelligence
and his nice-mindedness on the one hand, and his completely unbridled
instinctual life on the other’. 8
At the very least, the name conjured up associations with the terrors
of folklore and fairy tales, a field Freud was familiar with, through
the work of Jakob Grimm, Edward Tylor and Andrew Lang. Freud’s
predilection for striking images designed to maximize the impact
of his work would also suggest that the connotations associated with
the name he invented for his case history were deliberately invoked.
Indeed, in his memoirs, the Wolf-Man recalled that ‘we happened to
speak of Conan Doyle and his creation, Sherlock Holmes. I had thought
Freud would have no use for this type of light reading matter, and was
surprised to find that this was not at all the case and that Freud had
read this author attentively.’ 9 Certainly, although originally published
under the title ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’, ‘The Case
of the Wolf-Man’, as it came to be known, could also have worked as
the title for a werewolf mystery (and indeed, Algernon Blackwood had
already pre-empted the convergence of psychoanalysis and lycanthropy
in his 1908 story ‘The Camp of the Dog’).
Even so, Freud did not ostensibly intend to imply that his patient
was lycanthropic. The Wolf-Man never imagined himself to be, nor
did he behave like, a wolf. Rather, the Wolf-Man had experienced a
dream as a child, in which his window opened of its own accord and
he saw ‘six or seven’ wolves in a walnut tree outside staring fixedly at
him. He contextualized this dream for Freud as being connected with
his childhood fear of animals, particularly wolves. His older sister had
fuelled his phobia, taking particular delight in tormenting him with
a picture from a children’s story book which depicted a wolf standing
upright on its hind legs, stretching out a vicious paw.
Carlo Ginzburg argues that the Wolf-Man’s dream nonetheless
contained elements that betrayed an awareness of lycanthropy on the
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