“THE WOLF MAN”: PARADIGMATIC SHIFTS INTO THE NARRATIVE FANTASTIC

JOSHUA GOOCH

Rhetoric, Politics, Ethics Conference

University of Gent

18 April 2019

Tzvetan Todorov’s closing argument in The Fantastic are likely familiar enough to today’s literary critics:

[Psychoanalysis] has replaced (and thereby made useless) the literature of the fantastic.There is no need to resort to the devil in order to speak of an excessive sexual desire, and none to resort to vampires in order to designate the attraction exerted by corpses: psychoanalysis, and the literature which is directly or indirectly inspired by it, deal with these matters in undisguised terms.[1]

Speaking the unspeakable, or at least retranslating its symbolic import, is the perhapsthe simplest description of Freud’s talking cure, and Todorov’s point isquite simplythat psychoanalysis has co-opted the thematic enunciations of the fantastic. Yet I would hazard that in bringing Todorov’s point to bear on Freud, one may find that psychoanalysis’ supplanting of the literature of the fantastic reveals certain rhetorical intersections that explicate the hermeneutic structure of the emergent model of psychoanalysis. My interest here is then not the shared thematics of the fantastic but the shared structures of enunciation in these adjacent genres, though we will see quickly that the relation of genre form to content is, in a word, over-determined. To this end, I have chosen the Wolf Man case study, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” both for its elaborate narrative form and its overall importance to Freud’s work, in order to draw out these parallels with Todorov’s formulations.

First and foremost,we mustclarifywhat figures psychoanalysis retains from the fantastic, or perhaps more to the point, what exactly the fantastic is by Todorov’s definition. In Todorov’s words:

The fantastic occupies the duration of […] uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.[2]

That is, “The reader’s hesitation is therefore the first condition of the fantastic.” [3]As a structural feature, the moment of hesitationis ostensibly drawnfrom Lovecraft. However, the claim that “the fantastic is not situated within the work but in the reader’s individual experience”[4] may also be seen as part and parcel with what Freud elaborates in “The Uncanny” as the author’s ability to “keep us in the dark for a long time about the precise nature of the presuppositions on which the world he writes about is based, or [he can cunningly and ingeniously avoid any definite information on the point to the last.”[5]Building upon this subdivision of hesitation, we might claim thissecond narrative act,that is, the withholding of the information necessaryfor the proper construction of the text until the last, is a concomitant feature of the fantastic. This withholding—a forestalling that allows the fantastic to appear between the poles of the uncanny and the marvelous—also marks one of the standard criticisms of Freud’s work, such asStanley Fish’s typically pugnacious claim that Freud’s reservations equal those of the Wolf man, and constitute an equivalent act of “anal eroticism.”[6]And one cannot forget Todorov’s term“pan-determinism,” defined as “a generalized causality which does not admit the existence of chance and which posits that there are always direct relations among all phenomena,”which may be readily correlated with Freud’s “over-determination”liftedhere from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and quoted within Todorov’s own text.[7]Thus, for our purposes today, we will take these three pieces—hesitation, narrative withholding, and pan- or over-determinism—as the important and constitutive structures of the fantastic to be traced in Freud’s case study, if only for their explicit proleptic formulation by Freud himself.

In turning to“From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,”it is plain to see why someone like Fish might find it impossible to extricate a discussion of the Wolf man from the case study’s initial scant pages. Hence his claim that “most of the work of the case study has already been done, for although we have yet to hear a single detail either of the analysand’s history or of his therapy, we are already so much under Freud’s influence that when the details finally do appear, they will fall into the places he has prepared for them.”[8][9] What seems artificial in this is the presupposition of an already rigidified hermeneutics of psychoanalysis, though it is clear from the first that Freud expects the study to be understood as straddlingtwo registers,the one arecord of the particularities of therapy, and the other a theoretical polemic that elaborates and reifies the foundational concepts of psychoanalysis. The narrative of the case studyis thus always already a fight for space within extant theory for the insertion of practice. That is, the case study as a genre functions as a work of therapy acted in the midst of theoretical changes, a genre that is contradictorily dynamic and processual even as it attempts to elaborate a closed analytic situation and foreclosed hermeneutic.[10]The two registers bind themselves inextricably as the record of treatment intertwines with that of therapy qua theory, both undergoing a subsequent reification through the very process of inscription. Hence we cannot believe this simply the battle for infantile sexualitythat the title implies, but alsoa battle forits appreciable after-effects.In terms of Todorov’s fantastic, this is the split between what he terms the real and the imaginary, which for him is a question of whether the understanding or the perception of an event is problematic. But more on that later.

Constructing the neurosis retroactively, then,is pivotal for the narrative’s temporal construction and the analysand’s ability to convey—or indeed to retain—affect. Freud’s initial attempt to defend this post-facto analysis hinges upon, as he puts it, the “many words and thoughts [that] have to be lent to the child”for “the medium of recollection in an intellectually mature adultis free from these limitations; but necessitates our taking into account the distortion and refurbishing to which a person’s own past is subjected.”[11]Distortion and refurbishing are precisely what is instructive in the neurosis, for these constitute the integral processual machinations of the psyche as such. Thus Freud’s analysis necessitates what narratologists understand as the interdependence offabula and sjuzhet to describe the structure of the psyche properly, leading to what one might call the psyche’s aestheticization in its turn from bare record to literary object, that is, in the inextricability of its content andform.[12]The alternative, the narrative lent the child, is less acceptable for being all too closely mediated by the analyst—Klein’s treatment of little Dick being the pre-eminent example of this mediate and forceful turn toward the symbolic. Words thus take on material weight as they become the expression of affect. The readerly hesitation, that is, to quote Todorov, the first condition of the fantastic thus may be simultaneously premised as the very hesitation incumbent upon analysis itself, the disjunction of symbolic expression and intent as the analysand enters the situation of analysis. Fish is right then to claim Freud’s influence is all-encompassing—the analysand never speaks in this narrative but is always spoken for—yet a condition of the narrative’s intelligibility is the intersection, or at least asymptotic confluence, of the analysand’s symbolic logic and the analyst’s. The presentation of the Wolf man’s case is from the beginning enrapt by Freud’s hermeneutic, which is to say implicitly over-determined by the narrative of psychoanalysis itself. However, whether as pan- or over-determinism, this only leads us only to another commonplace of narrative: that it may interpellate its subject, in this case the subject of psychoanalysis par excellence. But this interpellation in the context of the treatment is altogether meaningless unless the subject actively recognizes himself in this interpellation. And just who is the subject here? The Wolf man? The analyst? The reader?

To answer that question, let us turn to another subdivision of the narrative, the tripartite division of the Wolf man’s neurosis: that is, first, the infantile neurosis as it antedates the adult, second, the adult neurosis as interdependent with yet also independent of the infantile, and, third, and perhaps most central and elusive, the analytic construction of the relation between them. Somewhat like Bergson’s cone of consciousness in Matter and Memory, no? The question, then, is whether this analytic construction is that of a totalizing narrative of constitutive foreclosure or the traversing of the interstitial gap of subjectivity. While the infantile and adult neuroses related by the Wolf man have some phenomenal status, the third division, that of the analytic intertext, stands as an everywhere that is nowhere, bringing the various narratives together to create the subject of the case study, what we might call the Wolf man qua Wolf man, the interpellated analytic subject. Navigating these variously intended endsthus becomes the crux of hesitation through a kind of readerly anxiety about the hermeneutic foreclosure exercised by the case study itself. Just as in the fantastic, in the case study a hesitation islocated within the reader as Freud winds these phenomenal strands into one ephemeral thread, woven through the woof of record and polemic.

To further complicate matters, Freud collapses the chronology of treatment with that of the neuroses, in effect redeploying the collapse that created the analytic subject in the analytic intertext, but now as an atemporal amendment clearing space for the unconscious. Neither chronology matters much except insofar as itmay be fitted to the narrative necessities of Freud’s polemic—for example, the withholding of “the child’s first gift” until the seventh section.[13] Freud’s inability “to give either a purely historical or a purely thematic account of [the] patient’s story” forces him to admit the combination of “the two methods of presentation” as“no means [have] been found of in any way introducing into the reproduction of an analysis the sense of conviction which results from the analysis itself.”[14]At best, he claims he may only “bring forward some new facts for investigators who have already been convinced by their own clinical experience.”[15]That is, he may only speak to those who have in some way already been spoken for. Like the Wolf man himself, the text interpellates the readers as similarly subdued subjects of psychoanalysis, though the gap that forms the Wolf man as an analyzable subject is here more nebulous. The reader must be defined in order for the proper hesitation to be elicited, and it is through this attempt at definition that Freud gains a detour into the technicalities of treatment. The maneuver forces one to relinquish any normalizing attribution of chronology to the description of the neuroses or their interrelation. Temporality becomes a kind of affect of neurosis, something analysis may only address by returning each of the individual phenomenal moments to their originalatemporal,atomistic status, or perhaps more succinctly, already related back to the already closed and completed moment of analysis as the very proof of neurosis itself.

Freud draws the relation of this ahistoric textual creation to therapeutic method via the unconscious, claiming the analyst “must behave as ‘timelessly’ as the unconscious itself,”[16]a reference to the analyst’s use of the unconscious in treatment as what he elsewhere terms“a receptive organ” to be used “as an instrument in the analysis.”[17]The timelessness of the treatment as it is narrativized becomes a rhetorical strategy for achieving narrative assent via an interpellative form of transference. One might even call this atemporality one of the foundational conditions of narrative legibility. After all, why do we read synchronically in any textual analysis?And, as such, the atemporal mode of narration, its retrospective form, functions as the gap through which the reader gains a sort of subject position. One might even say the problem of the genre of the case study results from its roots in the fantastic. That is, as the necessary hesitation also marks its inability to convey that“sense of conviction which results from the analysis” even as the conviction of its readers remains the implicit goal. Never mind the case study’s broadly announced intention as an account of “new facts for investigators who have already been convinced.” Indeed, the very status of theseinvestigators is what is really at stake: mere pages before, the case study quite broadly positionsitself as an argument between “libidinal motive forces” and “remote cultural aims”[18]–in other words, between Freud’s position of the primacy of the particularized experience of infantile sexuality againstthat of phylogeny and Jung’s version to the contrary. The “investigators who have already been convinced” are thus precisely those most in need of convincing. The doubling and redoubling of the narrative strategy itself embeds this supposed ambivalence in a particular discourse always already closed and shaped by the ended act of transference within analysis.That is, the Wolf man as empirical evidence. More broadly, the enacting of the problems of transference are not merely experienced within analysis but also the within the textual, thus enacting transference on a second level between the reader and Freud, a reenactment of the transference of analysis through displacement into the textual.[19]Freud’s atemporal narrativity, his authorly synchrony, while in one respect opening the way to the therapeutic use of the analyst’s unconscious, also stands as the impacted overcoding of chronology as such, offering us at once the sublimated categories of the Wolf man’s recollected chronology, the analyst’s reconstructed chronology, and the chronology of the analysis. The reader’s hesitation can only be further increased by the difficulty of achieving any sense of narrative flow in this oddly Bergsonian narrative structure. That is, we’re neither the point of the cone or its base, but the model as a whole, as viewed from the exterior. As Freud moves further from linear narrativity toward an atemporal map of the Wolf man’s psychical processes, then, the reader finds himself forced into an impossible choice: either accept Freud’s construction as a whole or attempt to tease the text apart moment by atomized moment.

What we’re confronted with, then, is a model of narrative based on the notion of transference, one which traverses the theoretical/therapeutic axis while mapping the transference of the therapy atop the transference of the argument. Freud’s re-creation of the analytic narrative of the neurosis and his polemic narrative of infantile sexuality ensures that, though all points should converge upon the Wolf man as narrator and narratee, they convergeinstead upon Freud. This disjunctiondestabilizes the center of the text, for the substitutive sleight of hand blurs the limits that demarcate the Wolf man’s story and Freud’s own. We might note here one of Todorov’s conditional conditions for the fantastic, that of an identification with a character in the diegesis, one bearing an ontological similitude to that of the reader. If there is no such certainty as regards the Wolf man, for Freud there should be no such problem. Indeed, Freud’s brief sketch of the chronology of analysis serves as the deceptive (interpellative) frame-narrative for the analysis proper, and here’s the twist: to overcome the Wolf man’s “shrinking from an independent existence”[20] Freud “[waited] until his attachment […] had become strong enough to counterbalance this shrinking, and then played this one factor off against the other,”[21]issuing in“all the information […] which enabled me to understand his infantile neurosis [in] this last period of work.”[22] Freud thus activates narrative transference through therapeutic transference. That is, therapeutic transference provides the frame from which the case study itself issues. And it does this through a series of identifications across textual levels—diegetically between Freud and the Wolf man, and intertextually between Freud and his (analyst) readers. In this cycling of transference, the Wolf man should be understood as caught in the process of reflective and retroactive narrativizing via identification: Narrative fact is an over-determined amalgam of what was spoken, echoed, probed for affect, and re-spoken, all without effect until “the disproportionately short time [in which] the analysis produced all the material which made it possible to clear up his inhibitions and remove his symptoms.”[23]Years are focalized through this single period, overlaying the chronology of the case study with a momentous present, if you will.

So while the ostensible frame of analysis fulfills a reference to “real life”—or at least existence outside analysis, Todorov’s “real” that may not be properly understood—the polemic frame insteadoffers reference to a second sense of reality, that is the perception of psychoanalytic theory, a problem of perception as one of linguistics, that “distortion” and “refurbishing” described earlier. This is the“third peculiarity” of the Wolf man’s case, for Freud’s "difficulty in deciding to make a report upon [the case]" was not because "its results have coincided […] with our previous knowledge" but because "many details […] seemed to me myself to be so extraordinary and incredible that I felt some hesitation in asking other people to believe in them.”[24]The already known within psychoanalysis stands as the boundary or perceptualframe reference of Freud’s theoretical work. Here one can see the ability of psychoanalysis to perceive itself under attack. The existence of the “extraordinary and incredible” available to Freud via this case constitutes a conflict with psychoanalyticperception, a case of the frame-narrative retelling or re-viewing the frame, precipitatingan authorly hesitation to mirror the reader’s.