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

I USED TO BE A WEREWOLF
burg’s effort to associate the Wolf-Man’s fear of wolves with a history
of belief in werewolves is evidence of this, as are the various accounts
of lycanthropy which include a discussion of Freud’s Wolf-Man. 16 Even
critics not directly concerned with werewolves have made the connection
between the Wolf-Man and lycanthropy; as Whitney Davis argues
in a work which re-examines the relationship between Freud and the
Wolf-Man, for example,
We might even say that it was the Wolf Man’s psychoanalysis — not his
Russian childhood — which turned him into a werewolf; this is certainly
true at the most literal level, of course, to the extent that the text of the
case history … transformed a sophisticated, multilingual, widely traveled
twenty-four-year-old man into an infantile ‘Wolf Man’. 17
Davis’s study implies that psychoanalytic technique has always been
impregnated with myth, echoing Ginzburg’s observations on the widespread
diffusion of myth in our culture, and other critics’ remarks
about the use of Gothic imagery in psychoanalytic literature. 18
As Ginzburg indicates, it would be pointless to attempt to explain
the Wolf-Man’s neuroses in terms of lycanthropy. The problems of his
adult life, even if they did not stem from his accidental or imagined
childhood observation of the ‘primal scene’ of coitus between his
parents (as Freud insisted), were not related to a fear of, or identification
with, wolves. Having said that, a sounding of Freud’s most famous
case and the myth of lycanthropy produces a fascinating series of
echoes and reverberations between these two different histories. Both
the werewolf and the Wolf-Man whose life-story was so inextricably
intertwined with the story of psychoanalysis 19 have much to tell us
about the history of subjectivity, largely because both have embodied a
very specific conceptualization of the human psyche as ‘divided against
itself’ — or, as perpetually at war with the ‘beast within’. Moreover,
both have shared in the elaboration of ideas about the experience
and expression of masculinity, not least because the battle against
the ‘beast within’ has been increasingly characterized as a peculiarly
masculine problem.
Freud is renowned for bringing a focus on gender to the study of
the self. Most significantly, he posited the coexistence of masculine
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