The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Stuart Schneiderman

 
If the Wolf-Man was finding procrastination rather comforting, Freud was becoming increasingly frustrated because the analysis had become bogged down. So he told his patient that he was going to stop treatment at a specific date, no matter what. Clearly, Freud was rejecting his patient. Surely the man experienced it as a punishment for not being a good enough patient.
The resulting wave of anxiety caused this young man to produce the kind of material that Freud wanted to hear. Eventually the brilliant analyst was able to interpret the patient's childhood dream and to construct a primal scene that he pronounced to be the root cause of all of the patient's problems.
In fact, the scene itself was implausible and the Wolf-Man never took it seriously. Later, when he was talking to Obholzer, he pronounced the reconstruction to be "far-fetched" and declared that he did not understand how the dream explained anything about his problems.
Discovering this scene did not cure the patient, any more than stories of sexual seduction had cured Freud's first hysterics. Yet Freud's followers rejoiced at receiving an explanation of neurosis that could henceforth be the goal of protracted analytic treatment.

[...]
 


Art: Sergei Pankejeff - How did the wolves get up in the tree? - pencil on paper, 1916
courtesy of Low Culture (and everything in between)

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