Andrew's Wiki
Wolf Man

Modernist Epistemology

• The question: if the primal scene didn’t actually happen, but was actually a fantasy-formation that took its content and logic from knowledge acquired in later years. He’s on the side of acting as if they were real, even though he admits that these stories are often just reconstructions.
  • Fantasies “are completely on par with memory in that…they find a substitute in dreams, analysis which regularly leads back to the same scene…in tireless variation” thus significance not the same as crude veracity
    • patients “gradually become firmly convinced of the reality of these primal scenes, with a conviction every bit as strong as that based on memory” 251
    • hmm you really are finding a narrative
  • He says that it’s necessary b/c the solving power of psychoanalysis requires that you have, “demands that all the effects radiate out from it just as all the threads of analysis lead to it, then as far as its content is concerned it is impossible that it could be anything but the reproduction of a reality experienced by a child….can only produce fantasies with material that he has acquired from somewhere” 254
  • What is the end of this first round of consideration? “We must stick to our guns—there is nothing else for it—either the analysis based on his childhood neurosis is a delusion from start to finish, or else the way in which I have portrayed it above is the correct one.” 255 HE begins pretty confidently….
    • Funny enough, he admits in an aside, “It was not my original intention to enter into any further discussion here of the real value of ‘primal scenes.’” And then he immediately says “there is indeed another possible interpretation of the primal scene that forms the basis for my patient’s dream, which diverts us a good way from the verdict that we reached earlier.” where he saw sheepdogs doing it and transferred it onto his parents days or weeks later
      • and yet even here “the fantasy scene unfolded…[and had the same psychological effects] just as if it had been entirely real and had not been glued together from two components,” one significant and one insignificant 257
      • he says he realizes “now made myself vulnerable to suspicions” by reader b/c belatedly introduces a plausible narrative AFTER he gave the one that sounds absurd
      • and then he says he must defer his judgment until another part in the case history, saying that he needs to let the rest of the case history unfold, and at the right moment “in due course” he will show “a moment will arise that will undermine the certainty that at present we believe we enjoy” (that is his audience’s lack of belief, for he is very on the defensive in this case). He takes so much joy in this aspect of the Wolfman: how he unfolds the case bit by bit. And how his own analysis must be a JOURNEY not an arrival. And then he says at that point to open up his textbook on psychoanalysis to understand it better. !
  • He says that people who insists it’s just a fantasy are afraid of admitting children’s potential, for one thing 248
  • Wouldn’t make a diff for method: “The analysis would have to follow exactly the same course as it would if, naively credulous, we took such fantasies to be truth.”
    • You couldn’t just say “That’s a fantasy” and cure the patient. You MUST go through the process: “to shorten this route…would be technically inadmissible” 249.
    • Pointing out that they’re not true is on the side of repression b/c we’re making them invisible.
    • And the patient wouldn’t cooperate if you said they were just fantasies
• “I should very much like to know myself whether my patient’s primal scene was a fantasy or a real experience, but taking other, similar cases into consideration we are obliged to conclude that it is not actually important to reach a verdict on this matter.” 295
• Whether or not the primal scene was truly experienced by the child, whether or not his urination in response to seeing the maid on the floor was truly sexual in nature, he nonetheless says that his analysis was correct.
  • Why? Lots of reasons
    • B/c even if it was just a fantasy, “His symptoms are then interlinked in such a way that they appear to proceed from a primal scene of this kind” 300
      • He has all kinds of fantasies that interpenetrate
      • Narrative coherence of symbolic logic is sufficient to create a persuasive effect of truth. It’s all about the way things are “expressed:” “he expresses the latter through anal symptoms appropriate for…”
    • B/c the primal scene and seduction scenes are “inherited property:” something beyond empirical experience that accounts for the mind and your personal history.
      • a kind cognitive necessity for the thinker: “child resorts to this phylogenetic experience when his own experience is not enough;” “prehistoric truth” (phylogenic: the study of evolutionary relation of diff species or groups) (also refers to Ernst Haeckel’s recaptulation theory – ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, single organism recapitulates in its growth the evolutionary development of its species)
      • interesting b/c modern science has kept but revised it into the embryo recapitulates the embryonic development of the species: like children…); however, Freud says that we should only use phylogenetic explanation when the ontogenetic one won’t work, and that we should start w/ontogenetic, ie that it did actually happen in someone’s childhood
      • “phylogenetically transmitted patterns that, like philosophical ‘categories,’ enable us to accommodate our impressions of life. I should like to suggest that they are the precipitates of human cultural history.” 317 but does say that this should be the last resort of psychoanalysis only AFTER you’ve “penetrated the layers of what has been acquired by the individual” (still prioritizes individual)
      • 318 “some kind of knowledge that resists definition, a sort of preparation for understanding, is at work in the child. What this might consist of defies the imagination.” analogy w/animals’ instincts; “this instinctive knowledge would form the core of the unconscious” (notice the subjunctive form here: this shows his tentativeness)
      • 318 ”...later dethroned by human reason when this is acquired…but often, perhaps always, retaining the strength to drag higher inner processes down to its own level” so that repression is that “would pay for his splendid new acquisition [reason] with the capacity for neurosis” and neurosis itself would “testify” to the instinct still there
    • B/c he’s working in a narrative paradigm, one that uses stories to understand human experience and to explain causality in the human experience.
    • B/c even if the man made up or embellished or misremembered certain events in his life, his merely think that they are so has had real effects in his life.
• Anguish of Interpretation
  • “We have to tell ourselves that we cannot discover everything, cannot decide everything on the basis of a single case and that we must be content to use it for what it can show us most clearly.”
    • me: this is great b/c we see more fundamental truth about modernism and science: not that it wholly rejects science, puts itself against science, which pretends to know everything and is boring quantification; but that science itself becomes infected with doubt
  • Wholeness just begs for a new wholeness (a new explanatory cycle with a new perspective on the problems)
  • “I do not know whether my readers will have succeeded in forming a clear picture of the genesis and development of my patient’s state of illness from the report of the analysis given above. However, whereas I never normally boast of my own narrative skills, on this occasion I should like to plead mitigating circumstances” 303
  • Why? B/c the mind is pretty difficult to represent: “such early phases and such profound strata of a patient’s inner life”
  • Why? B/c it’s so new: “a problem which has never before been tackled, and it is better to solve it badly than to take to one’s heels.” NEAT this can really give me a great ending quote to my modernism question!
  • Fragmentation
    • He was only allowed to get all of his info so well articulated b/c he talked to the adult: not to the child who actually experienced it
    • “bought at the price of the most dreadful fragmentation of the analysis and a corresponding incompleteness in my account of it.” 303

Other

• Mediation: says that the scene with the maid Gruschka “mediated” his later effects from the primal scene: that he understood primal scene via the second scene
• Significance of “childhood pre-history” for adult life)
  • “we have under-estimated children and are no longer able to say just what they are capable of.” 300
  • With child, you don’t have a clear distinction between conscious and unconscious inner life: “As far as the child is concerned, however, the distinction almost gives way. We are often at a loss to decide what we would describe as conscious, and what unconscious” 304
    • why? “consciousness in the child has not yet developed its full range of characteristics and is not yet entirely capable of being converted into language-pictures” 304
• Significance of words: “He said that for him the world was shrouded in a veil, and psychoanalytic training leads us to dismiss any expectation that these words might be meaningless or accidental.” 297
• Form: the analysis is done in multiple chapters, each which reveals a new facet of the problem, going deeper into one or the other part of the case, so that you think it’s solved; but then he reveals something else and he solves it; and then there’s more: Endless Production of Text and Explanation
  • “once again I shall attempt to re-interpret the latest results of my analysis…” 300
• Symbols
  • The patient is cured through a manipulation of symbols
    • “he constructs a childhood scene that recapitulates his wishes using archaic symbols as the medium of expression:” the stool-baby, the crouching position, the penetration of the father
  • Because of censorship, we have a sort of psychological semiotics
    • And Freud himself is the narrator, but also the translator, the symbol-reader
• Problems Solved By Interpretation
  • And yet he keeps adding and adding and adding, showing that interpretation’s only problem is that it doesn’t have the finality of science
  • Of course Freud has the cure of the patient as one pat ending: the patient is cured. Voila. Over. And yet the interpretive process for FREUD isn’t over.
    • interprets it via what we’d expect: oral anal phases; then through seduction narration; then through primal scene; then we see all of them together in a fully integrated scheme; then he analyzes it further; then mixes religion which had “gone off the rails” (313)
• Of course the emphasis on sex, and childhood sexuality and the family romance
• This Wolfman seems to be a goldmind of Freud’s: Oedipal narrative, masochism, anal phase, delusions of grandeur, eating disorder, obsessive-compulsiveness, phobias, sado-masochism, etc
• Libidinal Energy Charges
  • “the fluidity or viscosity of libidinal energy charges, and of other types as well, is a particular characteristic found in many normal individuals” and hasn’t been understood yet “like a prime number which cannot be divided any further” 314
  • psychic energy has mobility that “dwindles with age” that when it gets stuck you call that neuroticism
  • going from one substitute to the next, trying to evade the censors
  • “violently conflicting libidinal charges, all potentially functioning alongside one another” 316
• Fascinating connex with Beyond the Pleasure Principal: in a footnote mentions that the patient was Russian and admits that perhaps the suffering from the Great War and the Revolution—losing family money and homeland—“Contributed to the stability of his recovery by providing some satisfaction for his sense of guilt” 320
  • except that in the other book he will be more upset by what the war reveals
• 307: another example of my Veblen phenomenon: “The preparatory act becomes an objective in its own right.” Where the symbol vehicle becomes independent