A Psychoanalytic Bestiary: The Wolff Woman, The Leopard, and the Siren*

What potions have I drunk of siren's tears'

Whilst bestiality is a perversion in its own right, be it relatively rarely performed and seldom chosen as a sexual outlet, the fantasy of bestiality occurs regularly in the literary and sexual imagination. There is, of course, a more affectionate form of bestiality known as zoophilia which, apart from its tender strokings (a kind of furry kingdom frotteurism), involves pleasure in the observation of animals copulating. What comes to mind here is the ornithographic episode in Freud's study (1910) of Leonardo da Vinci's childhood memory, a fantasy of fellatio with the tail of a kite (nibio mistranslated as ‘vulture’) (see Bass 1985).

The incestuous performance or repetitive re-enactment of the drama of Oedipus is a topic I have addressed elsewhere . As in the case of Freud's “Wolf Man” (1918 ), it is important to insist on the retroactive construction of the primal scene and to emphasize its artificial quality (see Meisel 1981; Kaplan 1990; 1991, 132). Après-coup is the term in French Freud which renders Freud's German, Nachträglichkeit (Laplanche & Pontalis 1973, 111-14). Since the word for ‘wolf in French is loup, I developed the pun après-coup, après-loup in order to stress the close link between deferred action