Wolf man

One would be entirely justified in asking why I waste my time with books like this. It would have been better spent on any number of other texts I'm supposed to be familiar with. The book has a pretty well-known introduction by Derrida that I expected to write on, but I don't really have anything to say about it. I should probably try to find something to say about it, but I feel a strong need to move on to other things.

In their analysis of Freud's old patient the wolf man, Abraham and Torok go to elaborate lengths to decode messages hidden primarily in the Wolf Man's dreams, or the symptoms of his hypochondria. The wolf man, though analyzed in German grew up speaking Russian and had contact with English through his childhood nanny. It is therefore presumed that all three languages played a part in building up the web of associations encoded in his dreams. When he speaks of white wolves sitting in a tree, wolves sitting can be connected to the Russian word goulfik, which means both 'wolfing' and 'fly' (as in the fly of a pair of trousers), and white can be connected to the English and rhymed with 'wide' so that 'white wolves sitting' become 'wide open fly'. There are six wolves (corrected to seven and drawn as five), and a certain Russian word meaning 'group of six' sounds similar to a diminutive form of the word for 'sister'. So the open fly is related to the sister and leads to a traumatic childhood scene of father seducing sister. To give one example that makes use of German, when a dream involves a skyscraper, the beginning of the German Wolkenkratzer, sounds similar to the German word Volk, which can be translated into the Russian Buka, which is a homonym for Wolf. Rhymes also pass between languages, so though the fact that it is nighttime is mentioned in German, the Russian word Notchu should be heard and through its sound should evoke the English 'not you'. The problem with the use of this sort of metonymy of words should be clear. Beyond the fact that two Hungarians writing in French and not fluent in Russian can't possibly be expected to reconstitute the linguistic associations of a native speaker of Russian living in a German speaking environment (to attempt to do this for someone who shares a linguistic community is already impossible), an almost infinite number of associations are possible with every word and image when synonyms and 'rhymes' are available from three languages, and there is no criteria to establish which of those associations are legitimate. The authors do not attempt to hide the fact that they have searched for words that fit a hypothetic narrative they have constructed (granted with the aid of a large amount of already published material, by the wolf man himself, his therapists - including Freud himself, and numerous psychoanalysts responding to the famous case). Though the narrative they have constructed may seem plausible and the linguistic associations at least possible, there is no necessity in either that makes it preferable to countless potential alternative readings. Without strict rules or the authority of the patient analyzing himself (and therefore in some sense able to vouch for a particular reading), the game remains sterile.