The Wolf-man: Sex and sexuality Larissa Drigo Agostinho I dreamed that it was night and that I was lying on my bed, the window opened by itself, and I saw, with great dread, that some white wolves were sitting in the great walnut tree before the window. There were six or seven. The wolves were entirely white and looked like foxes or shepherd dogs, for they had large tails like foxes and their ears were standing like a dog's when they pay attention to something. With great fear - of being devoured by the wolves, certainly - I cried and woke [...]. The only action of the dream was the opening of the window, for the wolves sat very quietly on the branches of the tree, motionless, to the right and left of the branches, and looked at me. It was as if they were turning their attention to me. I think this was my first anguished dream. At the time I was three, four, at most five years old. Since then, and until I was eleven or twelve, I've always been afraid to see something terrible in my dreams. Everything starts with Sergüei and his sister Anna in a scene of seduction that plays a fundamental role, according to Freud. She grabbed the boy's member while weaving stories about the nanny (Nânia) who would have done the same with the gardener, placing him upside down and grabbing his genitals. Freud implies that the boy created many fantasies and dreams after this episode, "as if ... after the bath ... he had wanted ... to undress his sister". This would be an answer against the seduction of the sister who would have offended the patient's "male self-love". He defended himself against the passivity in which the scene of seduction put him in, dreaming of being the one who acts. "Such fantasies correspond precisely to the legends of a nation that once became great and proud, but still seeks to conceal the smallness and misery of its beginning" (Freud 2010, 30). In spite of the metaphor, Freud refuses to explore this path, just as he refuses Alfred Adler’s theory, who saw in sort of case a manifestation of the will of power, the instinct of affirmation of the individual. Freud does not deny the importance of the motives of power and privilege, but he is not convinced of their predominant role. By the age of fourteen, the brother-sister relationship improved considerably. In puberty, he seems to have sought greater physical intimacy with her. When he was rejected, he turned to a peasant woman who served in the house and who had the same name as his sister, Anna. This meant a decisive step toward "heterosexual choice of object, for all the girls he later fell in love with, often with the clearest signs of obsession, were also maids or servants, whose level of education and intelligence had to be below his" (Freud 2010, 32). Freud sees in this choice of object, an attempt to replace the rejecting sister. Such a choice bears the mark of "sister's relegation," in which Serguei sought to abolish his sister’s intellectual superiority which had so oppressed him. Freud (2010, 33) concludes that motives of power had determined the object choice only in the "sense of a contribution and rationalization", while "true, deeper determination" allowed him to retain previous convictions. This deeper motivation is of a "purely erotic" nature and is directly related to the patient's primary scene or fantasy. It is from this perspective, from the point of view the primal? scene offers, that Freud will interpret the dream of the wolves. Before presenting this scene, Freud develops the meaning of the experience of the threat of castration, which appears in the scene already mentioned in which the patient is touched by his sister. His sister's attitude puts him in a passive position. The sister evokes Nânia's name, with whom the patient had a mother-son relationship. The sister thus takes the place of the mother in this scene. As her substitute, she represents a passive, feminine position, even bordering on the masochistic, according to Freud. After his sister's rejection, he started to play with his penis in front of Nânia who threatened him by saying that children doing this kind of thing got a "wound" in its place. The patient claims that he stopped masturbating in the face of this threat and became extremely violent and irritable, especially with Nânia. The sexual life of the boy regresses to the pre-genital stage and acquires a sadistic-anal character. Due to that, the thought of castration occupied him, but it did not frighten him, Freud points out. The wolves were already present in the boy's fantasies. He remembers reading "Little Red Riding Hood" where children were taken from the wolf's belly. Was he a female being who could have children in his body? In this period, he begins to practice cruelties with small animals and to mortify Nânia, whorepressed him. The masochistic goal that the seduction would have given him, "being touched on the genitals", seemed to have been suspended. He also had fantasies in which boys were beaten. In these fantasies, the sexual organ itself receives the punishment, what indicates, according to Freud, the guilt before masturbation. Freud argues that, in this particular case, passive tendencies appeared after or at the same time as the sadistic-active, and adds: This is consistent with the patient's unusually clear, intense, and long-standing ambivalence, which was shown here, for the first time, in the uniform development of pairs of opposing partial instincts. This behavior remained a characteristic, and became a trait; none of the established positions of the libido has ever been totally canceled by a later one. It continued to exist alongside all others, which allowed a constant oscillation, incompatible with the acquisition of a fixed character (Freud 2010, 38). Is this not the evident sign of the limited character of the Oedipus complex and the sexual difference implied by it, in the understanding of the unconscious? The interpretation of the primary scene takes place thanks to the dream that would transform the patient into the wolf-man. This scene would have to be suitable to support the conviction of the existence of castration (Freud 2010, 51). The scene is the image of a sexual intercourse between the patient’s parents, where the mother is on all fours, taken from behind. According to Freud (2010, 53), this allows the child to see the mother’s and father's genitals, and to understand, "both fact and meaning." The wolf, which the child would have seen in the children's stories, in an upright position, which caused him so much dread, reiterated the position of the father in this scene. This fact allows Freud to conclude that the patient was actually afraid of his father, as this fear was attached to the upright posture. The image of the wolf walking on all four legs or lying on the bed did not frighten him. This explanation, however, contradicts the dream and the anguish caused by the seated wolves. But Freud goes on to claim that the position occupied by the woman in the primary scene is of no less significance, since the most singular phenomenon of the patient's love life was "sensual compulsive passion" that emerged and disappeared mysteriously and escaped completely from his control. The woman had to adopt "the position assigned to the mother in the primary scene," the patient was interested in women with large and protruding hindquarters and a sexual act that was not in this position hardly pleased him. Thus, from the primary scene - whose veracity Freud doesn’t question, as the scene is also a sexual fantasy of the patient that seems to clarify the phobia - Freud totally clarifies the boy’s dream, from the following process: "longing for sexual satisfaction with the father - intelligence of the condition related to it, castration - fear of the father". From the primary scene, Freud adds that "not a single sex stream broke, but a whole series of them, truly a fragmentation of the libido" (Freud 2010, 62). But these series and fragmentations do not escape Freud's attentive observation, which identifies each one of them. The anguish produced by the dream was a "refusal of the desire for sexual satisfaction with father." This passive attitude toward the father who placed the child in his mother's place had been suppressed, and the anguish before his father manifested itself in the fear of wolves. To assume a “position” when facing desire implies dealing with the losses caused by this binary choice. In the case of the boy facing castration, the woman's position appears as something repulsive, and activates the "narcissistic “genital libido", the boy protests against the renunciation of his member that this type of "feminine" passive satisfaction seems to imply. The dream allows the boys’ sexual reorganization. Whereas before the seduction, he had wavered between passivity and activity, since the seduction his sexual goal was passive, and became, "by regression to the earlier stage of the sadistic-anal organization, masochistic", to be punished, beaten. At this point, it was indifferent whether the goal would be achieved with a man or a woman. It was in the patient’s fantasy of being struck on the penis that Freud (2010, 65) found the nexus of regression. The relationship between the dream and the primary scene takes him back to the genital organization. "He discovered the vagina and the biological significance of male and female." This means that he "understood that active was equal to masculine, and passive to feminine". What motivates him to assume the heterosexual choice of object is the image that makes possible the affirmation of his masculinity that is nothing more than the effect caused by the fear of castration or its possibility. When facing the threat of castration he takes an active position, but only when the partner is in a "down" position, as if it were unbearable for someone other than himself to occupy the position of the wolf, which had so frightened him as a child. But if the wolf frightened him so much, could not that fear be the expression of a refusal of this position as well as a the rejection of the passivity? We could therefore present another hypothesis of interpretation: we could ask ourselves if the anguish the patient manifested was provoked by the opposition itself, that is, by the binary opposition of sexes. We know that Freud understands this fear as a fear of the father and the possibility of castration that would be the consequence, for the boy, to assume the feminine position. However, would there not be a problem with such identifications between feminine and passivity and, on the other hand, masculine and activity? Is not this precisely the cause of the boy’s anguish, who, facing the psychoanalyst had also to be reminded of a Christian morality that identifies activity and passivity with the possession of masculine or feminine genitals? The question is precisely the impossibility for the patient to find a place for his desire among such a rigid dichotomies as the socially and biologically determined. -- dichotomies that imbricate sexual positions and sexual choice of objects (being a man or a woman, desiring a man or a woman), with family relations and biological sexual difference. Was it not precisely the rigidity of these positions that provoked the patient's "unbelievably clear, intense and lasting ambivalence"? In Ended Analysis and Endless Analysis, the psychoanalyst recognizes that all would be well in psychoanalysis if the economic problem of desire were only quantitative; the question would be only to strengthen the self against the drives. However, there are qualitative factors in the desiring economy, which stand as an obstacle to healing and Freud reproaches himself for not having carefully examined them. (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 80). In this census of the obstacles to the cure, Freud points to three factors. The first is the "rock" of castration, a true wall with its two non-symmetrical strands (derived from the female / male pair) introducing an incurable alveolus around which the cure fails. The second is a qualitative attitude to the conflict that causes the libido to create, in the majority of people, oppositions that are irreducible to either of these two forces. Finally, the third obstacle, of such an importance that it dispenses with any dynamic or topical consideration, is a type of non-localizable resistance: we would say that certain subjects have such a viscous libido, a libido so liquid that nothing catches them. (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 80-81). Now, these are not the main features of the Wolf Man? Are not precisely these factors that made his analysis endless, to the point that he complained, at the end of his life, that analysis has been, for him, absolutely useless? It is a serious problem for Deleuze and Guattari that Freud was not able - even in the face of these obstacles, even having reached the point where he had to recognize that analysis could not finish - to put in question the healing process itself. He does not interpret these factors as obstacles to the cure, but as inadequacies, effects or counter effects of the healing process. (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 82) For Deleuze and Guattari, the castration that apears to Freud as analyzable is actually the effect of castration as a psychoanalytic act. Oedipal homosexuality is an effect of edipanization, which healing certainly does not create, but which precipitates and accentuates it in the conditions which are its transference. And when the libido resists healing, it is not a resistance of the self, but the cry of desiring production. (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 82). This is how Deleuze and Guattari proceeded to examine the case of the wolf-man. They point out the limitations of the concept of castration and its pertinence - due to the limited and exclusive character of the dichotomies such as male/ female, passive / active, homosexuality / heterosexuality - lead us to come across with the qualitative character of the libido, which is so liquid, so ambivalent that it seems to resist healing.In the case of the wolf-man, we find the dream, the wolves. The name that would be become his own, his desiring machine. The objective of the schizoanalysis and its critique of psychoanalysis, since this is one of its fundamental moments, is to achieve the investments of unconscious desire within the social field, i.e., out of the familiar determinations; and to achieve this objective, it counts on clues, signs that can be found in sexuality. The wolf-man seems to manifest a decisive taste for the poor woman, the peasant womanthe maid on all fours, either washing clothes the floor. The question here is whether these sexual-social investments of the libido and its object choices should be taken as mere dependence on a familiar Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 428). Should we see these women as commitment and substitutes of the mother or the sister due to the incest prohibition? Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 429) reject the Freudian interpretation that women of another class would be a "lowered" image of the mother because for them the other class is apprehended by the libido as "stranger, not-mother, not-father, not-family, evidence of what is nonhuman in sex." This nonhuman element is fundamental to the constitution of the desiring machines. It is not a question here of denying the importance of the intercourse between the parents or of the position of the mother in this intercourse. But when this position refers to a peasant or an animal what authorizes Freud to assert these substitutes for the mother, ignoring the social or generic difference? This critique of psychoanalysis aims, first of all, to show that the Oedipus complex transforms group fantasies into individual problems, of an "I" that is organized from the family triangle. The wolves, for example, are reduced to one unit, and then assimilated to the father figure, who carries the threat of castration. At the very moment when psychoanalysis discovers libido, separating sexuality and reproduction, the Oedipus complex centralizes this free energy. All agents of production and social anti-production are reduced to figures of family reproduction. (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 79) This more general critique unfolds in a more concrete critique, Anti-Oedipus intends to promote a materialistic revolution that passes through the critic of Oedipus when denouncing the illegitimate use of the unconscious’s syntheses operated and described by psychoanalysis. These syntheses are illegitimate because they are transcendental, that is, not defined by immanent criteria. The critique of these syntheses aims to expose the representative character of the unconscious in psychoanalytic theory. First, the oedipal use of connective syntheses is global and specific and has two aspects: parental and conjugal, this use is opposed to the immanent functioning of desire, where we find a partial and non-specific use of conjunctive syntheses. The second point, that marks the nature of the Oedipal structure is the substitution of the unlimited and inclusive use of disjunctive syntheses for limited and exclusive use. Finally, the third point concerns the opposition between the plural and nomadic uses of conjunctive syntheses to their biunivocal and segregated use. Here we will explore above all the first and second aspect of this triad that are directly related to sexuality. The oedipal use of connective syntheses is global and specific and has two aspects: parental and conjugal that correspond to the triangular form of Oedipus and its reproduction. It depends on an extrapolation paralogism which constitutes the formal cause of Oedipus and renders illegitimate the operation as a whole: it consists in extracting “from the signifying chain a transcendent object, as a despotic signifier from which the chain seems to depend, it designates a fault at each position of the Desire, binding desire to a law, engendering the illusion of detachment. "(Deleuze and Guattari 1973, 134) This operation is carried out by castration, the threat of castration, “the loss of the penis” that is actually loss of a male and active position, makes the organ appears, from the point of view of the unconscious, as privation or first lack. Here is the analytic paralogism or the formal cause of Oedipus, which can be found to a great degree in the theory of the signifier, an operation which consists of "moving from a detachable partial object to the position of a complete detached object. (The Phallus) "(Deleuze and Guattari 1972,74) It is the phallus, prevailing and transcendent, that distributes the fault and determines the sexes and the position of the "I" before the binary oppositions, in girls, the desire of the penis, in boys, the fear of losing it or refusal of the passive attitude. The great Phallus, with its faces that can not be superimposed, responsible for the dissymmetry between the sexes, makes it so that sexual relations can not exist. In this function, it could only be, for Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 73), purely mythical: “as the One of negative theology, he introduces the lack in desire and makes emanate the exclusive series which, fixes them an objective, an origin and a resigned course”. The global and specific use of conjunctive syntheses, operating through castration, also implies the limited and exclusive use of disjunctive syntheses, that is, both the position of the self and the choice of object presuppose a fixed self under such or such sex, "you will be male or female", “homosexual or heterosexual". We could also derive from castration, sadism and masochism, as a question that concerns the assumption or not of masculinity as activity, and the feminine position as passive. (At least in Freud). In Oedipal sexuality "partial objects, instead of a connective appropriation, become the possession of one person, and if necessary, the property of another" (88). The apex of this way of understanding desire based in the “I,” taken as a unit and differentiated according to the possession of sexual organs, appears in the Kantian definition of marriage ("completion of centuries of Roman legal meditation"), as the bond within which a person becomes the owner of the sexual parts of another. An example of partial and non-specific use of conjunctive syntheses (as opposed, therefore, to oedipal use) can be found in Proust, more specifically in Sodom and Gomorrah. Proust distinguishes two types of homosexuals. The first type do not care about the nature of the pleasure they receive since it can be linked to a masculine face, as others would be able to shock most people, perhaps because their senses are more violent, they require from pleasure overpowering locations. For them, women are not entirely excluded, they seek out those who can make them get a young man and increase the pleasure they have with him; still more, they can have with women the same pleasure they can have with men "because in the relationship that they have with them, they interpret, for the woman who loves women, the role of another woman, and the woman offers them at the same time more or less what they find in men." (Proust apud Deleuze, Guattari, 1972, P. 86) This same strategy of gender inversion and subversion can be found, for example, in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, where, against the rigidity of binary gender distinction, Butler argues that the "unnatural" character of the binarism should be exposed through its confusion, so that we would have a performative gender, "where “performative” suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning" (Butler 2007: 190). But is this strategy sufficient to escape all crystallization of identity? Is it the confusion or transgression of binarism enough to destroy binarism itself? Deleuze and Guattari take us beyond the confusion of binarism and praise for the performance or the contingent and local transgression of the binarism of sex. And this is only possible because in addition to the partial and non-specific use of conjunctive syntheses we find in Anti-Oedipus a theory of desire as a connection between partial objects that withdraw the subject or the global and specific person (understood in the form of the self) from the center of action and agency. Deleuze and Guattari prefer free and unlimited (no longer global or exclusive) connections between partial objects, against a desire that manifests itself in the form of the self that desires complete objects or global and specific people. Like this, The only subject would be the desire itself over a body without organs, insofar as it devises partial objects and flows, gathering and cutting for each other, passing from one body to another, following connections and appropriations that destroys the fictional unit of a possessor or owner-self (oedipal sexuality) (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, p. 89). Once the fictional unity of the self is destroyed, it is no longer necessary to speak in terms of gender, sex or even sexuality, because this vocabulary only makes sense within a representative thought where each sensation and intensity must be referred to as a socially intelligible representation of the I that shut down our desiring machines and prevent us from becoming able to even feel them. At the end of his life, after decades of analysis, Sergueï Pankejeff asked himself "in my story, what was explained by dreams, definitively? I could not tell. Freud relates everything to the primary scene, which he deduces from the dream. But in the dream it did not happen. "(Obholzer 1981, 70). For Deleuze and Guattari, the wolf-man in his dream could see the populations that inhabited himself. The wolves designated a bunch of intensities, a level of intensity, they say: I feel. "I feel that I become a wolf, a wolf among the wolves, in the frame of the wolves, and the cry of anguish, the only one that Freud listens to: help me not to become a wolf" (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, p 45). That is the reason why the Wolf Man feels so tired, He remains lying down with all the wolves in his throat, and all the small holes in his nose, all his libidinal values in his body without organs. The war will come, the wolves will become Bolsheviks, the Man remains suffocated by all he had to say. (Deleuze, Guattari, 1980, p.52)