4 - To Be Seen
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2020
Summary
Dimmi, occhio di topo
schiacciato sul selciato, dimmi:
chi guardi?
[Tell me, squashed eye of a mouse
crushed on the cobblestones, tell me
who are you looking at?]
(‘Occhio di topo’, Marcoaldi 2006)The Wolves are Watching Us
I dreamed that it is night and I am lying in my bed… . 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 prickled up like dogs watching something. Obviously fearful that the wolves were going to gobble me up I screamed and woke up… . The only action in the dream was the opening of the window, for the wolves were sitting quite still in the branches of the tree, to the right and left of the tree trunk, not moving at all, and looking right at me. It looked as if they turned their full attention on me – I think it was my first anxiety-dream. (Freud 2002: 227)
This is one of the most famous dreams in the history of psychoanalysis, known as the Wolfman dream. Freud – after long years unsuccessfully trying to break through his patient's resistances – finally interpreted it as the disguised return of the primal scene: a sexual relation between the patient's parents, which he would have witnessed around one and a half years of age. The dream's analysis – developed by Freud in painstaking detail, down to the time of day when the alleged sexual act would have taken place (five o’clock in the afternoon) – is extraordinary, but here I am only interested in one aspect of this dream to which, paradoxically, Freud pays no particular attention: the animality of the wolves observing the dreamer. Freud's patient, Sergej Costantinovič Pankejeff, dreamt of some animals, either wolves or dogs. Though Freud talks of wolves, he never really considers them as such, but treats them as ‘symbols’ of something else (animals often appear in Freud's writings (see Stone 1992; Genosko 1993; Sauret 2005; Cimatti 2016), yet always as symbols).
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- Information
- Unbecoming HumanPhilosophy of Animality after Deleuze, pp. 87 - 109Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020