One or Many or Six
I dreamed that it is night and I am lying in my bed (the foot of my bed was under the window, and outside the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know that it was winter in my dream, and night-time). Suddenly the window opens of its own accord and terrified, I see that there are a number of white wolves sitting in the big walnut tree outside the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were white all over and looked more like foxes or sheepdogs because they had big tails like foxes and their ears were pricked up like dogs watching something. Obviously fearful that the wolves were going to gobble me up I screamed and woke up.
The Wolfman’s Dream, from the History of Infantile Neurosis
A couple of years ago I wanted to write something about Sergei Pankejeff (aka The Wolfman, following Freud’s case study of him). Or, to be more precise, I wanted to write about the different ways that his dream had been interpreted, and something about the act of interpretation itself.
I never managed to finish it, mainly because something like this requires a lot of research, and my researching days are long since over.
I’ve come back to this to try to write a simpler, less informed version, mainly for the piece of mind of having started to think-through some of the questions and come to some kind of conclusion about it.
Back when I was a PhD student, I had to study a lot of Freud. More than this, I had to study a lot of the critiques of Freud, which often also mirrored the critiques of hermeneutics (the philosophy of interpretation), the field I was working in.
Freudian psychoanalysis is heavily dependant on certain presuppositions about language. Speaking, which is the core activity of analysis, is something that sets it apart from, for example, medicalized approaches to mental well-being, which may depend more on scientific methodologies and products like pharmaceuticals to help “cure” the “patient”.
Paul Ricouer was interested in Freud because he was thinking through the question of interpretation itself. That is, he was interested in the general role that interpretation can play in the sciences (given that Freud developed psychoanalysis along the lines of a scientific, rigorous method). At times, the act of interpretation itself is seen to be more enlightening than direct evidence or testimony.
For example, at the outset of Freud’s reflections on the wolfman case, he weighs up the alternatives of obtaining an account of a child’s neurosis directly from a child, with the alternative of obtaining the account (as Freud did) years later from the adult reflecting on their own childhood.
While the treating the case from the perspective of the adult “necessitates our taking into account the distortion and refurbishing to which a person’s own past is subjected when it is looked back upon from a later period”, i.e., while it may be less “convincing” to use Freud’s term, it is nevertheless more “instructive” and insightful. [ref: “From the History of Infantile Neurosis: Introductory Remarks”]
The psychoanalytic presumption, to simplify it a bit, is based on the idea that our words and behaviours are fundamentally opaque to us. Given the right setting and interpretations/, their connections to a deeper, inner life can be revealed. In these sense, it is a method for revealing the /truth behind words and behaviours which are opaque, confusing and often harmful to the analysand, and in doing so bringing forth some kind of therapeutic resolution. This translates more broadly to a presumption that there is some kind of method or technique that can be developed to get at the ‘psychological’ truth behind words.
There were two main critiques of this approach that I wanted to look at (which I will butcher in an attempt to paraphrase below):
(a) Deleuze/Guattari critique - “interpretation” sets itself up as getting at some “deeper” truth that lies beneath surface appearances. This is a myth; there is no “hidden depth” to things, no “thing in itself” that will be revealed through the right method. Instead of trying to interpret or understand a deeper meaning, we should be paying more attention to surfaces. The surface-meanings themselves already highly-differentiated and dynamic. I’m taking this way of framing the question from The Logic of Sense regarding Lewis Carroll’s /Alice in Wonderland/:
As one advances in the story, however, the digging and hiding gives way to a lateral sliding from right to left and left to right. The animals below ground become secondary, giving way to card figures which have no thickness. One could say that the old depth having been spread out became width. The becoming unlimited is maintained entirely within this inverted width. “Depth” is no longer a complement … It is not therefore a question of the adventures of Alice, but of Alice’s adventure*: her climb to the surface, her disavowal of false depth and her discovery that everything happens at the border. This is why Carroll abandons the original title of the book: *Alice’s Adventures Underground.
The Logic of Sense, p.9
The Freudian notion of interpretation and the corresponding psychoanalytic method relies on the kind of depth that we see deconstructed in Alice in Wonderland (for example). For Freud, the Wolfman’s dream is a surface reflection of a deeper trauma (witnessing his parents having sex), a deeper truth that can be decoded through careful (and suspicious) parsing of the language. But this model of thinking, which reduces the sign of a “wolf” into a signifier of some inner life, misses the detail of the text itself, which highlights that there was not “one” but “many wolves” that appeared in the dream. The dream is not reflective of a single event, but an expression of a multiplicity of potential meanings (and a multiplicity of identities within the Wolfman).
As Deleuze and Guattari famously wrote “A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch.” In other words, all of this business of digging deeper into the meaning of words/dreams, through the careful guidance of the ’expert’ analysis, is a model of thinking that denies the complexity and multiplicity of psychic life which is not simply about the ‘roots’ or ‘origins’ of desire, but about the way in which desire itself is a machine which produces effects. Effects are not signs of the past, but are their own creative processes that build new futures.
The approach of Deleuze and Guattari is also political. In Freud’s model, the analyst is the authority figure, helping to guide the analysand to discovery. In the alternative approach, the individual themselves are the authority. Dreams, words, meanings are significant at the individual level, they are signs and intensities for the individual to follow, not taxonomies to be situated within some kind of theoretical framework developed by an external authority.
(b) Deconstruction critique - Again, words do not have a single, fixed meaning which can be utilised to build up a picture of some ‘definitive’ truth. Instead, the meanings of words are elusive, conflicting and chaotic. The act of interpretation is not outside of this process, but another chaotic participant in the creation of meaning. It is not a process whereby a deeper truth is arrived at through careful reading, but a combatative negotiation process, where there is no ‘centre’ ground or resting place for meaning to lie. Like the approach of Deleuze, interpretation should also start with language itself as opposed to refering to some ‘method’. That is, language is not some ‘intermediate’ step on the way to meaning, language is its own complex tapestry which gives the effect or the impression of meaningfulness. If we want to understand meaning, we need to start by pulling on the threads of this tapestry until there is nothing left. These is no ‘psyche’ behind the meaning, the concept of the psyche is itself produced as an effect of the interpretation process.
For example, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok point towards the fact that the Russian Pankejeff was multilingual, and that in his native language, ‘pack of six’ (the number of wolves in the tree) is a “sixter”/shiestorka, which is a homophone of the Russian for sister (siestorka). Or, in other words, the text itself contains the trauma encoded within it, there is no need put forward some kind of expected scenario (under the Freudian method) based on the ‘symbolism’ of the word ‘wolf’.
So, is it one wolf, many wolves or exactly six wolves? Did the child Pankejeff witness some mysterious event (Freud), did his dream represent the multiplicity of the self and its connections (Deleuze/Guattari), or did it encrypt a trauma which could only be dug out through a careful deconstruction of language? Is language symbolic (pointing beyond itself), multiple (generative/creative) or cryptic?
As valid as the many critiques of Freud often are, I think that all of the approaches above, which take what the Wolfman said seriously are perhaps becoming a lost art. More and more I hear people who have attended therapy talk about how, for example, training oneself to speak, think and behave in certain ways is often the approach advocated (and, indeed, seems to have lots of benefits). Or, there is also the use of medication, which is still on the rise [1]. As ‘oppressive’ as Freud’s method seemed to Deleuze/Derrida, in its emphasis on the primacy of interpretation (a language-based activity) it still stands apart from approaches that reduce our psychology to an purely scientific ‘object’ of study and manipulation.
I guess the only conclusion that could be arrived at is that all the thinkers above agreed that Pankejeff was in pain, and that language held the key to understanding his psychic journey.
