Verticale/Animale. Differenze di specie, teoria freudiana e il caso storico dell’Uomo dei lupi [Upright / Animal: Species Difference, Freudian Theory and the Case History of the Wolf Man]

In this essay I argue that Freud’s celebrated case history of The Wolf Man is haunted by the spectre of species difference. His manifest aetiology of the patient’s early illness is strongly focused on the latter’s response to the ‘primal scene’ of parental coupling and to the vision of male and female genitalia with which the scene confronts him. I suggest that Freud’s account of the case, in which the key factor is thus the orthodox psychoanalytic theme of sexual difference and castration, rests on a tacit discounting of another modality of difference: differences among and between other creatures and in particular between human and non-human animals. The goal of the essay is not, however, to put species difference ‘back’ into The Wolf Man by fleshing out some alternative aetiology independently and at a remove. Rather, through a close analysis of the case history and with contextual reference to a frequently overlooked strand of Freudian theorizing, I try to show that the text already retains certain overdetermined traces which, against the grain, adumbrate the significance of species difference – though these are localised, displaced and foreshortened, and in no sense claimed as part of Freud’s manifest clinical narrative.