Exilic Symptoms in the Wolf-Man's Memoirs

Abstract

Some aspects of the identity construction in the autobiography of one of Freud's most famous patients are analysed through a close reading of the text, with an emphasis on the first sentence and the three characteristics he chose to apply to himself. I suggest that his experience as an exile was formative in his perception of himself. What interests me here is neither the experience of emigration nor that of neurosis per se, but rather, how the two merge together and make the Wolf-Man into the kind of person who wrote, at the very end of his turbulent life, ‘The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man’. Julia Kristeva's idea of ‘abjection’ helps me explore the construction of a personalized narrative and the institution of a framework of relations between a self and the world. It is my contention that the notion of ‘abjection’ can explain those aspects of the Wolf-Man's multi-layered identity that concern the man's experience of exile, and which were practically neglected by his analysts—Freud and Ruth Mack Brunswick, who obsessively focused on the Wolf-Man's alleged early childhood sexual experience.