You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In the previous Chapter I attempted to show one current of advance in Freud's grapplings with problems of clinical psychopathology during the decade 1917-27 (expressed in terms, of course, of publication dates). We can generally assume a considerable lag between writing and publication early in this period, for instance the “Wolf-man” history was written in 1914 but published in 1918 and is therefore really more contemporaneous with “On Narcissism” than with “A Child is Being Beaten”. And yet the papers of the post-war period which I wish to discuss seem to hark back to the clinical experience of the “Wolf-man” very often, although not explicitly stated. But that this case made a great impression upon Freud cannot be doubted, for as late as 1937 he was still referring to it.
The whole line of papers from “A Child is Being Beaten” (1919) through “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924) to the paper on “Fetishism” (1927) seems to have been inspired by the work with the “Wolf-man”. It is well to remember that the patient lived in Vienna after the war and had his paranoid breakdown there in 1926. What I propose to try to demonstrate is that Freud took hold of the concept of masochism very firmly in relation to the clinical phenomena of the case itself but kept losing it in later years during the transition in his notational system from the libido theory to the structural theory.
Freud goes to great length to plead the theory of the primal scene in Section IV on the wolf-dream, only to beg the entire question later in Section VIII (p. 97), “All that we find in the prehistory of neurosis is that a child catches hold of this phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him”—i.e., threats, seduction or exposure to parental coitus. In another paper written about the same time (“A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Theory of the Disease”, S.E., 14, 1915) he uses the theory of the primal scene to great advantage in explaining the woman patient's delusion that he