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70 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
and feminine traits in the psyche of every individual, male or female.
Integral to this rethinking of gender was the notion that masculine
psychology involves the repression of feminine traits in the unconscious,
although Freud’s characterization of feminine psychology
was more problematic, as evidenced by his infamous claim that women’s
sexuality is ‘a “dark continent” for psychology’. 20 In this sense, as Lynne
Segal observes, he equated male psychology with human psychology
‘from which women … are seen to deviate’. 21 Nevertheless, R.W. Connell
suggests that Freud’s psychoanalysis was in fact the ‘first sustained
attempt to build a scientific account of masculinity’. 22 For both Connell
and Segal, Freud’s description of masculinity as a contradictory and
unstable construct has been crucial to subsequent work on the subject.
Further, as Connell notes, Freud ‘provided a method of research,
“psychoanalysis” itself; a guiding concept, the dynamic unconscious;
a first map of the development of masculinity; and a warning about the
necessary complexity and limits of the idea.’ 23 The case of the Wolf-
Man, with its lessons about ‘the tensions within masculine character’
and its articulation of masculinity as ‘a complex, and in some ways
precarious, construction’, was Freud’s most significant demonstration
of this approach. 24
Ultimately, Connell indicates that Freud’s work has made it difficult
to separate theorizations of the psyche — and, in particular, of the
unconscious — from theorizations of masculinity. Because Freud’s conceptualization
of the unconscious was developed through the analysis
of masculinity (and, specifically, through the case of the Wolf-Man),
the subsequent history of the unconscious converges at many points
with the history of masculinity. Freud also gave the notion of the
‘beast within’ a more general scientific legitimacy which facilitated
its entrenchment in further discursive contexts, beyond the domains
of religion and philosophy. Certainly, Dorothy Scarborough’s reading
of the werewolf as an increasingly ‘psychical creature’ in her study
The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917) documented the
strengthening of a psychological approach to the notion of the ‘beast
within’ since the fin de siècle: