Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

64primal scenes that haunted the Wolf Man had been part of his words. This is what Abraham andTorok mean by incorporation, 19 which is a replacement of Freud’s theory of repudiation. Freud’sclassic paradigm of melancholia explains not only how psychic split occurs, given the ego’sinability to incorporate the lost object, but also why keeping the lost object’s image is satisfactoryand compensatory:The free libido was not displaced on another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There,however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to establish anidentification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fellupon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though itwere an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into anego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage betweenthe critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification. (“Mourning andMelancholia” 249)According to Freud, the Wolf Man’s sexual desire was splintered up by a primal scenehisparents having sex a tergo. Abraham and Torok came up with a different approach that replacedthe “splintered” libido with the “shattered symbol” 20 and the construction of the crypt. Abrahamand Torok based their analysis on rhetoric. According to them, the Wolf Man’s words hide otherwords. His words hide secrets concerning his older sister. As he wanted both to forget and hidethese secrets, the Wolf Man, encrypted his sister but he disclosed these secrets through rebuses,metaphors, and wordplays. The six wolves (siestra in Russian) means that his sister is at thecenter of the nightmare.What is a crypt? Derrida argues in his foreword to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: “Nocrypt presents itself. The grounds [lieux] are so disposed as to disguise and hide: something