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In the mind there is a continual play of obscure images which coming between the eyes and their prey seem pictures on the screen at the movies. Somewhere there appears to be a mal-adjustment. The wish would be to see not floating visions of unknown purport but the imaginative qualities of the actual things being perceived accompany their gross vision in a slow dance, interpreting as they go. But inasmuch as this will not always be the case one must dance nevertheless as he can.-William Carlos Williams (1920/1970, p. 67)
At a point in his discussion of the Wolf Man's infantile neurosis, Freud explains how he believes the material all comes together; specifically, how the neurosis and the wolf dream as reported by a man in his early twenties recalling events from his early childhood is linked to him seeing his parents having sex in a particular way-that is, to a specific primal scene-when he was one-and-a-half years old. Freud concludes these remarks with this claim: “either the analysis based on the neurosis in his childhood is all a piece of nonsense from start to finish, or everything took place just as I have described it above” (Freud, 1918/1955, p. 56).
However, on the very next page of the Standard Edition translation of the case, Freud writes a long note, added to all later editions, in which he concludes that it really was not necessary for everything to happen just as he had hypothesized in his original report. He gives several examples of possible alternative scenarios, including the likelihood that as a child his patient had seen dogs having sex, rather than his parents. He concludes with the comment “I intend on this occasion to close the discussion of the reality of the primal scene with a non liquet” (“it is not clear”; Freud, 1918/1955, p. 60).
In the course of the discussion Freud explains why his thinking has changed on this matter. But what struck me, when I first read the text as a candidate, was the question: why did Freud leave the original claim in