I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. My nurse hurried to my bed, to see what had happened to me. It took quite a long while before I was convinced that it had only been a dream; I had had such a clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting on the tree. At last I grew quieter, felt as though I had escaped from some danger, and went to sleep again." (Freud 1918)
.
This was the dream of the famous "Wolf Man," Sergie Pankejeff.
.
Parkejeff was an aristocrat from Russia: his problems in included his inability to have bowel movements and a severe depression.
.Freud's interpretation was that he had witnessed his parents having sex a tergo. The dream played a major role in Freud's tehreoy of psychosexual development.
.Several years after he finished seeing Freud, he had psychotic delusions that a doctor had filled a hole near his nose and would walk down the street staring at his reflection in a mirror.
.He was in and out of Freudian analysis his whole life; he told a journalist at the end of his life, "the whole thing looks like a catastrophe. I am in the same state as when I came to Freud." He saw Freud's interpretation of his dream as "far-fetched."
.Interestingly, this information about the failure of Freudian psychoanalysis in one of its cornerstone cases is not well publicized.
No comments:
Post a Comment