At the end of 1869 and the beginning of 1870, a two-part essay appeared in the Fortnightly Review that established the problem of the totem as an object of study in anthropology and, I will argue, had a decisive influence on the new discipline itself. John Ferguson McLennan’s “The Worship of Animals and Plants” used current ethnographic literature, principally on western Australia, describing totem worship “among the existing tribes of man” as evidence for a general claim that “ancient nations came, in prehistoric times, through the totem stage, having animals and plants, and the heavenly bodies conceived as animals, for gods before the anthropomorphic gods appeared.”¹ McLennan’s argument made a crucial contribution to establishing the founding paradigm for comparative anthropology in the post-Darwinian era – for what Robert Alun Jones terms “evolutionary anthropology.”² This was the premise that all human societies pass through the same stages of cultural development, with the result that so-called primitive societies “could be viewed as evidence in reconstructing the history” of the modern societies of the West.³ McLennan’s ideas shaped an entire subsequent discourse on totemism, whose acceptance was such that Sigmund Freud would open his 1913 Totem and Taboo with the assertion that it had by then become “incontestable” that “totemism constitutes a regular phase in all cultures” (13:108).

In fact, Freud’s work on totemism came late to the game. The critique of evolutionary anthropology began in 1896 with Franz Boas’s essay on “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology.”⁴ Its implications for the study of totemism were made explicit in 1910 by Boas’s student Alexander A. Goldenweiser, whose “Totemism: An Analytical Study” argued both that human societies have different histories, and therefore need not all pass through a totemic phase, and also, more radically, that the very concept of “totemism” was an artifact of anthropology’s disciplinary assumptions. Only by bringing together evidence from societies in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, and contemporary Australia, Polynesia, and North America, had anthropologists been able to assemble a composite idea of totemism as both a religious system and a form of social organization. Absent the assumption that all societies develop in the same way, and that evidence drawn from different places and times can therefore be aggregated to draw conclusions about the general concept of totemism as a phase of universal history, the concept itself dissolves into a diverse array of ritual practices, dietary prescriptions, plant and animal taxonomies, and clan systems.⁵

In a 1962 retrospective on the late nineteenth-century emergence of the discourse on totemism and on its twentieth-century decline, Claude Levi-Strauss proposed a suggestive analogy. “Totemism,” he wrote, “is like hysteria, in that once we are persuaded to doubt that it is possible arbitrarily to isolate certain phenomena and to group them together as signs of illness, or of an objective institution, the symptoms themselves vanish or appear refractory to any unifying interpretation.” As Levi-Strauss goes on to note, the comparison of totemism and hysteria “suggests a relation between scientific theories and culture … in which the mind of the scholar … plays as large a part as the minds of the people being studied.”⁶ For Levi-Strauss, the “particle of truth” in the “illusion” of totemism is indeed the unsuspected resemblance between Victorian anthropologists and the peoples they studied;⁷ for Robert Alun Jones, the “secret” of totemism is that the concept was determined by the disciplinary history of anthropology and the historically specific questions that drove anthropological research.⁸

In this chapter, I won’t undertake either a structural analysis of totem discourse or an intellectual history. But I will begin with a type of structuralist bracketing of the referent, to identify two leading traits of the discourse, which I will argue are determined less by the Australian, South Pacific, American, and Near Eastern peoples it ostensibly concerns than by a crisis in species relations, and in the concept of species, in the late nineteenth-century West. The first of these traits is the centrality of species to totem discourse, which always understands its topic as a practice of classification: of plants and animals, of foods, and ultimately of persons into permitted and forbidden sexual partners. The second trait that will concern us here, notwithstanding the anthropologists’ eventual theorizing of totemism as regulating sex, will be its mystification of sex’s role in sustaining and constituting populations.

Totemism was from the outset theorized as a practice of taxonomy, grounded in the concept of species. In 1870, the same year as McLennan’s foundational paper on the worship of animals and plants, John Lubbock made a crucial distinction between totemism and fetishism: “The negro who has, let us say, an ear of maize as a Fetich, values that particular ear … but has no feeling for maize as a species. On the contrary, the Redskin who regards the bear, or the wolf, as his totem, feels that he is associated with the entire species.”⁹ James George Frazer, in his survey of the field in 1887, makes Lubbock’s distinction his point of departure: “As distinguished from a fetich, a totem is never an isolated individual, but always a class of objects, generally a species of animals or plants.”¹⁰ The distinction between the fetish and the totem is foundational for the discourse of totemism. More broadly, it marks the foundation of anthropology in a conceptual break with the enlightenment critique of religion, which relied on the concept of fetishism as a paradigmatic type of error. Its replacement as a major theoretical paradigm by the totem establishes a new disciplinary orientation towards the study of religion as historically valid within a complete social system.

In connection with accounts of rituals where totems are sacrificed and brought back to life, Frazer speculates that “the idea of the immortality of the individual totem, which is brought out in these ceremonies, appears to be an extension of the idea of the immortality of the species, which is, perhaps, of the essence of totemism.”¹¹ This passage typifies one aspect of totem discourse, in that it shows the instability of the border between the ontological position of the totem worshipper and that of the anthropologist: “The idea of the immortality of the individual totem” is apparently held by the Zunni people whose turtle worship Frazer has been discussing. “The idea of the immortality of the species,” of which he interprets the Zunni ritual as an “extension,” is less clear. Is this idea Frazer’s? What indeed is Frazer’s relation to the concept of species in general, recalling that this concept, and that of species immortality, were both under extreme pressure as he wrote? Species had gradually ceased to be sure of immortality in the early nineteenth century, with the great French taxonomist Georges Cuvier treating the evidence of species extinction as settled science. In 1859, Darwin’s Origin of Species had made extinction more than an occasional accident, drawing it into universal history and making species no less mortal than individuals.

To argue in the last third of the nineteenth century that immortal species provide the basis of social organization in all human cultures at an early stage of their history is thus to endow a contingent idea with implausible universality. The plasticity of species demonstrated by Darwin was moreover not only a conceptual problem in the late Victorian period. It pervaded culture and politics. Foucault’s late work gives the long history of how between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, the category denoted by the term “human” changed from a metaphysical to a biological one. In the nineteenth century, Foucault wrote, “Western man” learned “what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, possibilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner. For the first time in history … biological existence was reflected in political existence.”¹² By the late nineteenth century, perceived risks to humankind’s biological existence as a species had become the occasion for a general politicizing of sexuality and marriage, of the organization of the family, and of the sale and consumption of food and drugs. In each of these fields, law and medicine marked certain bodies, spaces, and habits as threats to the species’ survival. A central argument of Foucault’s lectures from 1975 to 1976 at the Collège de France is that modern racism, culminating in the scientific racism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is motivated by the biopolitical project of killing or quarantining that which threatens the species.

The discourse of totemism emerged in anthropology contemporaneously with the pseudoscience of race in ethnography and medicine. Its project was to show the universality in human societies of dietary taboos and of marriage customs structured by the systematic distinction of permitted and forbidden sexual partners. As we have seen, the lynchpin that bound these structures together as parts of a complete social system was the concept of species.

This concept’s operation in totem discourse, however, was profoundly incoherent. The totem, we recall, is by definition a species rather than an individual; totemism is the division of society into groups defined by their affinity with distinct totem species. As well as a religion, totemism was also from McLennan’s foundational articles of 1869–70 onwards always theorized as a kinship system. McLennan had previously published a book, Primitive Marriage, on bride capture as the basis of exogamy – a term he was responsible for introducing into the study of human societies.¹³ In his articles on “The Worship of Animals and Plants,” he argues that totem-worshipping societies are organized into exogamic clans, each taking its name from a different totem. The data supporting this claim came from Sir George Grey’s 1841 account of the clan system prevailing among the indigenous people of western Australia, in which clans took their names from animal or vegetable species, and in which marriage between members of the same clan was prohibited. McLennan linked this system to the clan system found in some North American First Nations, and gave the resultant general concept the name “totem,” which had been brought into English from the Ojibwe language by American travel writers.¹⁴ Further, McLennan asserted that, in societies where totemism prevails, it is more than a mere naming system, but rather has as its basis a belief in the literal kinship of clan members and their totems: “American Indians, like the aborigines of Australia, regarded themselves, we have every reason to believe, as being of the breed of the totem.” For the people of the Caribbean and of the South West, he cites sources in ethnographic literature; for the remainder of the continent, “regular authorities being silent,” his source is James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans, which relates how “a party of warriors, comprising a Beaver, happening to pass a colony of real beavers, the Beaver refused to pass without addressing his kinfolk. ‘There would have been a species of profanity in the omission,’ says Mr. Cooper. … ‘Accordingly, he paused and spoke. … He called the animals his cousins.’”¹⁵

Though the focus of McLennan’s work is on the place of totemism in the history of religion, his claim that worshippers of a totem “in every case” believe themselves “to be, nominally at least, of its breed or species” was the basis of all the work that followed on totemism as a complete social system.¹⁶ Since clan membership was based on shared kinship with the totem, the prohibition of marriage between members of the same clan appeared in the light of his work as a taboo on incest. And the prohibition on killing and eating the totem appeared homologous with a taboo on shedding the blood of one’s kin.

I have argued that late Victorian theorists of totemism were preoccupied with species and with the regulation of sex and diet because they projected onto other societies the biopolitical concerns of their own. In an aside that suggests the logic of this projection, Frazer saw a resemblance between the structure of a complex totem society, with totem groups superposed on groups so that any given individual would have several totems, and the hierarchical classification of organic life into “genera, species &c.”¹⁷

Theorists of totemism thus understood it at once as a system that classifies things – animals, plants, persons, foods – and as a system that scandalizes classification. The concept of the totem is as we have seen inseparable from that of the species; at the same time, however, for every theorist writing after McLennan, totemism is understood as a system of cross-species kinship. The major consequence of this contradiction in totemism discourse is the emergence of symptomatically disturbed theories of kinship itself.

Although totemism was understood to have at its center the social regulation of sexual activity, its theorists actually have remarkably little to say about sex. Far more space is devoted to rituals and regulations concerning the consumption of plants and animals as food, and the power imputed to dietary practice in establishing kinship and constituting populations makes the second striking trait I want to discuss in totem discourse.

The most influential British work on totemism in the whole history of its study was William Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, published in 1889. Robertson Smith was a scholar of the Old Testament who knew both McLennan and Frazer; McLennan was his senior and a strong influence; Frazer was a contemporary and a continuing interlocutor. Unlike the work of McLennan and Frazer, Robertson Smith’s focuses on the ancient Near East, not on putatively primitive societies in his own time. Rather than anthropology, he writes religious history from the standpoint of Christianity, to which he sees all other forms of worship as pointing the way. His work belongs to the discourse of totemism, though, because he adopts from McLennan and Frazer the hypothesis that all societies pass through a phase of totem worship during their religious development. Robertson Smith’s work argues that the traces of this phase are legible in the Hebrew Bible and in other records of the ancient Near East, as well as in Greek and Roman myths associating the Olympian gods with animals. Above all Robertson Smith doubles down on the idea that totem worship entails belief in the kinship of worshippers and their totem. Among the Semites, he writes, “the original type of religion, out of which all other types grew,” was one “in which the deity and his worshippers make up a society united by the bond of blood.”¹⁸

My topic in this chapter is the work late nineteenth-century writers do by using blood as a symbol for social bonds. In the first instance, blood retains its ancient significance as a figure of inheritance, though an inheritance that is no longer primarily based in law, and that no longer has the family as its principal field of operation. Inheritance now binds populations into societies defined by race or species. This view of inheritance defines Robertson Smith’s understanding of social bonds and determines the object of his argument:

This passage opens a lengthy consideration of the criteria by which the Semites can be considered an “ethnographical group”:

Blood here stands as a figure for racial inheritance understood as the property of a collectivity, of whose biological history Robertson Smith interprets the cultural inheritance of language as a token.

Notwithstanding this passage’s identification of blood with a “natural classification” of peoples, in the Lectures as a whole, Robertson Smith assumes throughout that kinship in the societies he studies is made, rather than naturally given, and that the means by which it is made is the literalization of this self-same figure. In these societies, he asserts, blood stands for kinship, as it does in his own text. “Blood,” he writes, “is the primitive symbol of kinship.”²¹ Without further explanation, Robertson Smith assumes that in the societies he studies, this symbol is always confused with what it represents, so that his work abounds with accounts of blood-brotherhood rituals, in which participants “become brothers by opening a vein and sucking one another’s blood,”²² and of ritual incisions in the course of initiation or mourning rituals.²³

The assumption that the literal sharing of blood forms the basis of kinship is built into the main argument of Robertson Smith’s Lectures, which was the basis for its influence on Freud. Like his precursors in the study of totem worship, Robertson Smith held that totemism was at the root of dietary taboos, which he viewed as affording special protection to the totem animal on the grounds of kinship. He extends the interpretation of dietary taboos, however, in a theory intended to account for the practice of animal sacrifice, widely attested in the Hebrew Bible, in classical texts, and in other ancient sources. He argues that the sacrifices these sources describe are the survivals in ancient cultures of a prehistoric totemic phase.²⁴ In this phase, sacrificial animals were of the totem species, chosen for their special holiness: “in a religion based on kinship, where the god and the worshipper are of one stock, the principle of sanctity and the principle of kinship are identical.”²⁵ Under these circumstances, the sacrifice of a sacred animal can supersede the usual taboo on its consumption on condition that the sacrifice be the act of the entire tribe or clan:

Robertson Smith’s hypothetical sacrifice thus affirms the kinship of the sacrificial animal and the clan members who join together to take its life. Moreover, he proposes, not only does the clan affirm its kinship with the animal by participating in its death, but also and above all by sharing it as food. Though the animal’s

As readers in Robertson Smith’s own time noted, his claim that animal sacrifices in the ancient world were survivals of prehistoric totem worship had little but conjecture to support it. The one text he adduces that describes a group of kindred feasting on a sacrificial animal dates from the fourth century, and is thus of dubious relevance to the analysis of prehistoric societies.²⁸ Written, as I have said, from a Christian standpoint, the work is strongly motivated by a wish to establish that Judaism contained in its origins a prefiguration of the Christian sacrament.

Nonetheless, the work had broad cultural impact. I will argue that it influenced Bram Stoker, whose Dracula (1897) follows Robertson Smith in recalling from Deuteronomy the phrase “the blood is the life,” and in reading it to mean “that the race has a life of its own, of which individual lives are only parts.”²⁹ Robertson Smith’s ideas were of course central to Freud’s work on totemism. Most broadly, he gave expression to a general hystericizing of blood in the late nineteenth century that resulted from the emergence into politics of populations and their aggregated life as a field of concern. In Robertson Smith’s terms, “The only thing that is sacred is the common tribal life, or the common blood that is identified with that life.”³⁰ The figure of “common blood,” far from being primitive, is absolutely characteristic of late Victorian biopolitics, both in its emphasis on the collective biological existence of the population, and in its profound mystification of how the population, or “tribe,” is constituted.

*****

Though totemism was an artifact of nineteenth-century intellectual history, that is not all it was.³¹ Just as the discourse of hysteria produced hysterics, the discourse of totemism made totem worshippers: If the evidence of Freud’s case histories can be accepted, they were to be found in the schools and nurseries of Europe, not in Western Australia. How could it be otherwise for children raised on Carroll’s Alice books (1865, 1871), Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), Christina Rossetti’s Sing Song (1872), Kipling’s Jungle Books (1894, 1895) and Just So Stories (1902), Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit (1901), and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908)? The Jungle Books, with their narrative of Mowgli’s adoption by wolves, even provided the model for Robert Baden-Powell’s organization of young Boy Scouts into “packs” of “wolf cubs.”³²

In Kipling’s jungle, the “Master Words” that Mowgli has to learn are an assertion of species identity figured as blood: “We be of one blood, ye and I.” Animals claim kinship with others of their kind by speaking the words in their own language. In the story “Kaa’s Hunting,”³³ Mowgli, the human child protagonist who is adopted by wolves, learns that to survive among the animals, he must speak all of their languages, so that he can in case of need claim kinship with any of them.³⁴ The story that follows his lesson shows him saving himself by claiming blood kinship first with the carrion-kites and later with the snakes, enacting in its use of the figure of blood the same contradiction we saw in totem discourse, where blood is at once the fundamental figure of species identity and a basis for cross-species identification. For Kipling, the human boy belongs to a universal species, whose ability to mimic the attributes of all the other animals makes him their master.³⁵

A more anxious, literalizing use of blood to figure the collective life of a population is the organizing principle of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There is no evidence to say whether Stoker read Robertson Smith’s Lectures, though it seems likely that he would have at least known of them. In any case, his novel’s preoccupations with race and species identity, with cross-species affinity, and with dietary practices, and its mediation of all of these themes through the figure of a social circulation of blood, locates the two texts in a shared cultural moment. Along with other late Victorian vampire narratives like Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), moreover, Dracula shares with Robertson Smith’s Lectures an unexamined assumption that blood relationship obeys a sacramental logic – that is, that by consuming the blood of another person or of an animal, one becomes their kin.

***

Late Victorian Gothic fictions share with their Romantic-era models such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and James Hogg’s Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner (1824) the use of character doubling as an organizing principle. In response to the late Victorian crisis in the concept of species, though, as Mario Ortiz-Robles notes, in the fiction of this era, the monstrous double is animalized.³⁶ In texts like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Beetle (1897), and Dracula, Gothic now puts in question the species identity of its protagonists. At the same time, the fundamental Gothic theme of the remainder from an otherwise dead past – a literary topos which we saw in Chapter 4 itself influenced Darwin’s understanding of living bodies as containing organic remainders of their own histories – is transformed into a preoccupation with biological atavism.

As we saw in Chapter 6, Dracula is the literary culmination of the nineteenth-century emergence of a social circulation of blood, functioning both as a basis for identification – of bodies sharing “the same” blood – and for multiple kinds of differentiation: 1) between speciated or racialized bodies having different bloods; 2) between bodies bearing diseased or tainted blood and healthy bodies; and 3) between bodies on the basis of their propensity to bleed. As we have seen, all of these modes of differentiation are at work in Dracula, as is the concept of a society defined as sharing a common blood supply. But the single most striking thing about the novel is that, notwithstanding its massive investment in taxonomies of species, race, and gender, in its version of the vampire narrative all of these taxonomic boundaries can be crossed by the act of sharing or consuming blood. In this respect, the novel resembles Robertson Smith’s Lectures and totem discourse more generally.

The theme of male doubling in Dracula develops along two narrative paths, both well trodden by earlier Gothic texts. One of these paths dominates the novel’s first sections: Jonathan Harker is invited to Castle Dracula on the pretext of completing legal work for Dracula’s purchase of a property in England; it emerges, however, that the real reason Harker has been brought to the castle – where he shortly finds that he is a captive, rather than a guest – is to enable the Count, following his planned move to England, to pass for a native. Harker finds in Dracula’s library that he has been studying books “relating to English life and customs and manners,” as well as dictionaries, almanacs, and maps. Dracula allows that through these books he has come to “know” and “love” England (50), but laments that “alas! as yet I only know your tongue through books. To you, my friend,” he says to Harker, “I look that I know it to speak,” so that on his projected move to London, “no man stops if he see me, or pause in his speaking if he hear my words, to say ‘Ha, ha! a stranger!” (51). Dracula thus aims to model his speech and appearance on Harker’s so as to appear “like all the rest” (51) in England. His self-fashioning on Harker’s model extends later in the opening chapter to stealing and wearing his clothes so as to impersonate him. Most strikingly, because in Stoker’s version of vampire lore the vampire does not cast a reflection, when Harker looks into a mirror while the Count is standing behind him, he is startled to see that “the room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself” (56). When Harker looks for Dracula in the mirror, the image he sees is his own.

In doubling narrative number one, then, Dracula appropriates Harker’s identity; Stoker’s novel allegorizes this appropriation as a desire to drink his blood. I will expand on this claim after outlining a second way in which male doubling structures relations between Stoker’s “crew of light” (to adopt Christopher Craft’s term) and their monstrous adversary.³⁷ Since Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, a weirdly eroticized and ambivalent anti-Catholicism has been a staple feature of Gothic fiction – it remains so to this day. Dracula fully embraces this Gothic motif. With respect to his English and American antagonists, Dracula embodies an un-dead piece of history. This fact above all reflects the novel’s political plot, which stages a confrontation between the bourgeois, imperialist states that for Stoker embodied modernity and the feudalist, ethnic social order of which Dracula, alone in his ruined castle, is a remnant. But Dracula’s religion, as well as his politics, makes him an anachronism in nineteenth-century England. Stoker’s vampire mythology makes Dracula vulnerable to artifacts of Roman Catholic worship, notably the transubstantiated host and the crucifix. If there were any doubt of the specifically Catholic provenance of these holy objects, the vampire hunter Van Helsing explains, as he commits an apparent sacrilege by rolling up the host and stuffing it around the door of Lucy Westenra’s tomb, that “I have an Indulgence” (248) – at once showing that he is himself Catholic and hinting that, like other Gothic protagonists in years to come, he is well connected in the Church hierarchy.

Another axis along which Dracula’s plot doubles the vampire and his antagonists, then, is that of Catholicism. The English and American characters in the crew of light carry out Van Helsing’s plans and use the sacred objects he supplies, but do not share his religion; Harker, for instance, identifies himself as an “English Churchman” and notes that he has been taught to view the crucifix as “in some measure idolatrous” (35). Van Helsing, a Catholic stranger in London who speaks accented English, is thus the most obvious of Dracula’s doubles, and indeed his leadership of the vampire hunt follows the logic of Wagner’s Parsifal: “The spear that made the wound must heal it” – or that of schoolyard homophobia: “It takes one to know one.” As Talia Schaffer observes, Van Helsing’s crucifix is “a vaccine against vampirism – but like a vaccine, it initiates the disease against which it protects.”³⁸

The man whose identity he wants to assume and the man who can see him for what he really is are by no means Dracula’s only doubles in the novel. Indeed, thinking about Dracula as organized by relations between doubles risks treating its characters too much as individuals and neglecting the extent to which they are types – representatives of populations or segments of populations. The novel’s fundamental subject is the war of populations – and its organizing figure for the vampire’s war on the “swarming millions” of England’s population is his appropriation of its blood, which as we have seen, the novel imagines as an undifferentiated fluid circulating at large through the social body. The theme of the double, the secret affinity between Dracula and the characters who oppose him, at bottom stages the extreme porousness of the envelope enclosing this body, the population that the vampire threatens.

The novel is explicit on these points. The vampire has provoked an autoimmune response at home, where a population alert to the threat he poses shuns him and reduces him to short rations – apparently to feeding only on small children. Van Helsing figures him as leaving a land that has become “barren – barren of peoples – and coming to a new land where life of man teems till they are like the multitude of standing corn” (360). There he plans to become the “father or furtherer of a new order of beings” (343) like himself. The equivocation in Van Helsing’s formulation underscores how in this text sexual reproduction as the driver of population is mystified, replaced with the literalized figure of blood kinship, as it is in totem discourse.

Dracula then stages a war between population groups constituted by shared blood. Four of the male members of the crew of light give their blood by transfusion to Lucy Westenra in a doomed attempt to save her from the vampire’s depredations. Dracula vampirizes and establishes a telepathic bond with Mina Harker by forcing her to drink his blood. Each of the warring populations from the standpoint of the other appears animalized. Dracula in his one encounter with the crew of light memorably compares them to sheep and jackals: “You think to baffle me, you – with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher’s. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! … Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine – my creatures, to do my bidding, and to be my jackals when I want to feed” (347). To his human antagonists, Dracula is “brute, and more than brute” (276); or, to Mina Harker, a Thing “not human – not even beast” (267). In these passages, the novel suggests that the biopolitical threat posed by Dracula is that of unclassified “bare life”; when the boxes of soil in which he rests are made inaccessible to him with pieces of the host, they are repeatedly characterized as “sterilized.”

Stoker’s conception of the vampire has animal models, notably the vampire bat. To become a vampire is to be gradually animalized, beginning with the development of canine fangs. And of course the vampire can appear in animal form – above all, as a bat – and summon at will the aid of non-human animals with whom he has an affinity, such as the wolf and the rat.

Notably, Dracula’s affinities tend to be with animals that appear in a pack or swarm; in his encounter with his adversaries too, when he compares them to sheep and jackals, he turns for his analogies to a herd animal and one that roams in packs. The foundational antagonism in Stoker’s novel is between population groups, not individuals.

To understand the animality of Stoker’s vampires, it is useful to contrast the novel with earlier Victorian representations of struggle against animality represented as a form of atavism. Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) propounds a pre-Darwinian idea of progressive evolution in which the human species develops by losing traits supposedly characteristic of non-human animals: “Move upwards, working out the beast, / And let the ape and tiger die” (118. 27–8). Charles Kingsley’s post-Darwinian The Water Babies (1863) includes a devolutionary fable in which a tribe he calls the “Doasyoulikes” quickly devolve into apes, losing the ability to raise food, to walk upright, and to speak. In both cases, the animal allegorizes human traits that the writers deplore: violence, imitativeness, lust, dirt, laziness, and so forth. In both, the animal also represents what the writers view as the primitivism of suppositious racial groups – Irish, in Kingsley’s case, and in Tennyson’s, African and South Asian.

Stoker’s Dracula does not allegorize any specific character traits; nor, though the novel is fully invested in late Victorian racial ideology, does the vampire typify any particular “race.”³⁹ He embodies not a particular population, but the concept of population; it is not his individual life but the life that he bears that threatens his adversaries, inasmuch as this life requires their death. Like the totem, Dracula embodies the collective life of his race or species, including the idea of species immortality. Immortal as he is, his memories and the racial memory of his people appear as one. The novel’s crusade against him seeks to exterminate an entire species or genre of life: Dracula is in this sense a genocidal text.

***

By embodying the concept of population in the vampire, Dracula establishes that the late eighteenth-century genre of Gothic retains a critical edge with respect to late Victorian biopolitical and eugenic ideas. Our reading of the novel opened by establishing that the novel doubles the vampire with his principal antagonists and that it symbolizes this doubling by the transfer of blood between them. Thus Dracula’s plan to adopt Jonathan Harker’s identity is symbolized as a wish to drink his blood. In a broader view, we can now see that the vampire stands at once for the population and for the biological agent that threatens it, or more abstractly, for the doubling of biopolitics and thanatopolitics. Besides the threat of blood loss that the vampire poses to the collective in Stoker’s novel, then, it also renders visible the symbolic work that blood does in affirming kinship between the different individuals and groups that it comprises. I have already argued that Dracula embodies the concept of population; we can now add that he represents not only a biopolitical threat to the teeming millions of Britons, but also by a dialectical necessity the body in which the biopolitical concept of population actually becomes visible.⁴⁰ In his body mingles the blood of men and women, of Catholics and Protestants, and of white inhabitants of both the Old World and the New.⁴¹ In the novel’s plot, Dracula is the antagonist who brings the disparate members of the Crew of Light together and forges their identity as a collective; in its symbolic argument, the figuration of the collective as constituted by the mingling of its members’ blood shows its biopolitical character. The novel’s Gothic narrative represents the population as an artificial body whose ability to assimilate many lives into one is fundamentally morbid. Its accumulation of life – allegorized as blood – is figured as excessive, wasteful, and uncanny, and its self-reproduction entails violent death.

The Crew of Light themselves, though joined in the course of the novel by the tie of blood, are compared to the vampire strikingly uninterested in reproducing. The Crew’s male members are linked by professional ties as doctors and lawyers and by friendships formed while hunting big game, and Dracula follows the conventions of the adventure story in setting its heroes a task that calls on each of their talents to complete. The social ties that join the vampire hunters are thus emphatically homosocial, and the novel indeed bears a relation to other late Victorian genres that require an all-male team to renounce women for the duration of the narrative.

The exception that proves the rule in Stoker’s novel is the inclusion of Mina Harker as a vital member of the Crew. During the course of the novel, Mina marries Jonathan Harker, an event for which she prepares by studying typing and stenography. Her skills, like those of the men, prove indispensable in the campaign against the vampire, and late in the novel Van Helsing credits her with “a great brain … trained like [a] man’s brain” (481). It is true that unlike her friend Lucy, Mina does not put the men of the Crew at risk by her sexual allure; to this extent she is represented as unfeminine. But the secretarial work Mina does was in fact fully characteristic of the generation of women who in the 1880s and 1890s entered office work in Britain and the United States along with the new technology of the typewriter, displacing the male clerks of an earlier era, represented in the fiction of Dickens and Trollope, who wrote by hand.⁴² The novel’s point is thus that a woman’s work is as vital to the Crew’s success as that of the men: Mina not only contributes the technical ability to transcribe records in different media, including Jonathan’s stenographic diary and Seward’s dictaphone recordings, and reduce them to a single text legible to all; she also serves as an affective medium. Only to her are the novel’s male characters able to reveal the incredible or shameful secrets of their encounters with vampires, so only she is able to assemble the entire narrative of Dracula’s invasion. Mina’s work as a mediator culminates in the telepathic connection she is able to make with Dracula as he seeks to escape at the novel’s end.

Mina is thus an essential member of the Crew and cements the homosocial bonds that constitute it. And though the novel thus incorporates in its representation of the struggle against Dracula an argument about the complementarity of men’s and women’s talents, it remains resolute in keeping the serious business of adventure sex-free. Mina and Jonathan’s wedding – and their wedding night – take place while the latter is confined to a hospital bed in a convent. The room they share in Seward’s asylum is the scene of Dracula’s attack on Mina, to which she responds by declaring herself “unclean! unclean!”, echoing the menstrual taboo of Leviticus 19:15–33.

Only with Dracula’s death is the taboo seemingly lifted. In the “Note” with which the novel ends, dated seven years after its main action ends with the vampire’s killing, Jonathan reveals that he and Mina now have a son, born on one of the anniversaries. They have given the boy a “bundle of names” that “links all our little band of men together” (419) – making him the last of Dracula’s doubles, a final figure of the collective body.⁴³ Like a vampire, the baby boy is nourished by sucking; and, though as an individual he is the result of sexual reproduction, symbolically his appearance at the novel’s close reiterates its concern with how the collective body reproduces and perpetuates itself.⁴⁴ While Mina and Jonathan’s baby does not literally mingle the blood of an entire population, his life is nonetheless founded on death: of all his names, the one his parents actually call him by is Quincy, to commemorate the American killed by Dracula’s attendants in the final moments of the novel’s action. Dracula’s exiguous romance plot cannot conceal the novel’s concern with the constitution of the biological population by killing, a concern that it shares with Robertson Smith’s Lectures and with the broader literature in totemism.

***

In at least two respects, the subject theorized by psychoanalysis belongs to the historical period treated in this book, in which from the late eighteenth century politics becomes concerned with life as such. The first of these arises from the centrality to psychoanalytic theory of a specifically sexual unconscious, which, as Emily Steinlight writes, is “the site of political collectivity and of species-being.”⁴⁵ Freud’s postulate of an unconscious formed of rejected libidinal positions, of sexual attachments from the past that remain active in the mind of a subject who can no longer acknowledge them, was the result of clinical experience. It was the most controversial of Freud’s claims, giving scandal to his contemporaries, and precipitated divisions among the first generation of psychoanalysts when leading figures including Alfred Adler and Carl Jung split with him to embrace broader concepts of the unconscious based on cultural archetypes or on aggression. The idea that some kinds of mental activity could be carried on without being admitted to consciousness was by no means new when Freud advanced it and indeed provided a key paradigm for Victorian theories of mental illness and aberrant behaviour. These included, on the one hand, well-developed theories of compulsive action and automatism, and, on the other, theories of alienated or divided consciousness owing to external agencies such as mesmerism or shock. Psychoanalysis, with its early use of hypnosis and its analysis of symptomatic acts as a means of access to unconscious material, has long been recognized as building on these existing areas of research.

Freud’s account of an unconscious constituted by the repression of sexual desire, however, made a decisive break with nineteenth-century psychiatry. It also broke with the long history of Western writing about sex, where it has rather been associated with an excess of consciousness than the reverse. To find a precursor for Freud’s sexual unconscious, we need to leave the field of individual psychology and look elsewhere, to demographics and natural history.⁴⁶ We have already discussed ideas of unconscious agency in Darwin’s work, culminating in the idea of sexual selection as a mechanism by which a population unconsciously shapes its own phenotype. Beginning in The Origin of Species, Darwin presents unconscious selection as an inevitable result of the cultivation of other species by human beings. In The Descent of Man, he theorizes sexual selection as a species’ self-cultivation, by which the aggregated aesthetic preferences of a population’s individual members confer a reproductive advantage on possessors of body types and other traits deemed beautiful. These traits in time propagate and intensify, becoming embodied as distinctive to the population in question. Darwin held that the visible markers of racial difference in human beings – for instance in body type, skin pigmentation, distribution and quantity of body hair – were for the most part produced in this way.

In this view of the unconscious agency of sex in constituting populations, Darwin develops a way of theorizing about sex and population that Thomas Malthus had pioneered in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). The well-known premise of Malthus’s Essay is that “the passion between the sexes” is an unvarying part of human nature, appearing “to exist in as much force at present as it did two thousand, or four thousand years ago” (16). The result of what Malthus calls a fixed law of nature is that populations tend to expand until they are checked by shortage of food or other resources (15). Like Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Malthus’s Essay relies heavily on analogy. Neither the exponential growth nor the collapse of human populations are in fact to be observed as such; Malthus deduces what he characterizes as the tendency of human populations to increase at an exponential rate by analogy with animals and plants, which “are all impelled by a powerful instinct to the increase of the species. … [W]henever … there is liberty, the power of increase is exerted; and the superabundant effects are repressed afterwards by want of room and nourishment, which is common to animals and plants; and among animals, by being the prey of others” (21). But the power of increase in human populations is almost never observable: in Malthus’s time, as he discusses, it was even a matter of dispute whether the European population had increased at all since the Roman Empire. In human beings, the sexual instinct is repressed by what he terms the “preventative check” caused by individuals’ rational decisions not to have children whom they cannot support (32–8). Only among the poor does the “positive check” (39) to population appear, in the forms of malnutrition or disease – and there, the supposed checks can be read, and of course were read by Malthus’s critics, as the effects of poverty rather than of overpopulation – of a failure to distribute the available resources, rather than of an absolute shortage.

The supposed instinct to increase the human species in Malthus’s work thus never appears as such. Malthus hypothesizes that its operation produces what he terms an “oscillation” or alternation of “progressive and retrograde movements” in economic conditions, by which rises or falls in the price of labour serve as a signal triggering cyclical growth and retrenchment in the population. Even in this form, however, the population’s tendency to increase “has been less obvious, and less demonstrably confirmed by experience, than might naturally be expected” (23). The reasons Malthus adduces for the non-obviousness of the oscillating predominance of sex and death include historians’ attention only to “the higher class” and the difficulty of determining the real price of labour (23).

In Malthus’s account of the human sexual instinct from the point of view of population, then, it is not only invisible as such, but it manifests itself in the oscillating predominance of population growth and of checks to that growth. These checks include not only deaths caused by overpopulation itself, but also the vaguely specified “vice” that Malthus represents as the form sex takes under overcrowding. This Malthusian view of sex as the hidden regulator of population, bringer of both life and death, containing within itself both its own check and its own perversion, shapes the pervasive linkage of sex and death in post-Darwinian European culture – with Dracula only one of innumerable examples. Our reading of the vampire as personifying a collective body in which the conjunction of biopolitics and thanatopolitics is made manifest, would thus need to be extended, such that this personification could be seen at work in the male protagonists of Baudelaire, Wagner, Swinburne, and Hardy, to name only a few.

It is in the milieu defined by these writers, of course, that Freud formulated his theory of sexuality and the unconscious. The sexual basis of the unconscious was a key premise of psychoanalysis from the Studies on Hysteria on; in what Freud considered his purely psychoanalytic works, beginning with The Interpretation of Dreams, however, sex has the peculiarity – as in Malthus – of always appearing divided against itself, as precipitating its own check. In the first iteration of libido theory, the psychic apparatus’ tendency to satisfy itself by immediately discharging any accumulation of energy through fantasy is checked by the development of the reality principle. This latter Freud theorizes not as opposing satisfaction, but as deferring it; as he put it later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it enjoins “the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure” (18:10). In Freud’s early work, the checking of the pleasure principle by the reality principle is the basic form of psychic conflict, and the motive that eventually leads the developing subject to repress portions of the libido whose satisfaction is incompatible with reality. In Freud’s late work, with the introduction of the so-called second topographic model of the mind, he develops another theory of the sexual instinct as self-checking when he proposes that the ego itself is libidinally invested, and thus develops a theory of psychic conflict based on the demands the ego makes with respect to the subject’s choice of external sexual objects.⁴⁷ Repression in this view derives from a check that sex imposes on itself.

Freud’s final model of psychic conflict does not quite postulate, as his earlier work did, a division of the sexual instinct against itself. Beyond the Pleasure Principle is nonetheless his most Malthusian work, both because it resembles Malthus’ Essay in having the conflict of life and death as its structuring principle and because the work takes as its topic not only the individual psyche but more broadly the claim that psychic conflict is ultimately only an instance of a conflict immanent to life in general. In Freud’s work from this period on, the paradigm for psychic conflict is the conflict between the sex drive and the death drive, psychic agencies that Freud now understands as working through the individual body while joining it to the long history of its species and indeed of living matter as such, on whose behalf they are ultimately viewed as acting. The sex drives are therefore those which “watch over” the germ-cells and “bring about their meeting with other germ-cells”; “they are the true life-instincts [Lebenstriebe]” (18:40), since they aim at a kind of immortality – that of the population, or of the species. These drives “operate against the purpose” of the others, whose aim is death. Because all life is affected by the conflict between these two countervailing forces, Freud writes,

There is no evidence that Freud read Malthus.⁴⁸ The figure of the vacillating rhythm in this passage reappears in the other figures of oscillating movements and halting steps that pervade Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but I do not mean to suggest that they allude directly to the oscillating movement of the population in which instinct is manifest for Malthus. Rather, I have tried to show in this section that Freud’s concept of sex as an agency that works through individuals who remain largely unconscious of it, and that becomes visible in moments of conflict when it turns against or checks itself – that Freud’s entire concept of sex presumes a post-Malthusian biopolitical framing, which by his time had become so pervasive that it received virtually no explicit notice in his writing.

The other respect in which the Freudian subject is a biopolitical subject has only an indirect relation to his Malthusian affinities; it is the pervasive identification of the subjects in Freud’s case histories with non-human animals. In four of Freud’s six extended case histories, the subject’s ambivalent relations with a species of animal play a major role. In two of these, the cases of Little Hans and of the Rat Man, a full-blown animal phobia precipitates the analysis; in the other two – the cases of the Wolf Man and Dr Schreber – material related to the wolf and to the eagle emerges in the course of the analysis.

These case histories were published between 1909 and 1918, and, making allowances for the many differences between them, they have in common Freud’s interpretation of his subjects’ relations with animals as figures for their ambivalent relations, at once rivalrous and identificatory, with their fathers. Though he only explicitly cites the history of Little Hans and his horse phobia, Freud’s experience in this whole group of cases shaped his argument in Totem and Taboo – the first of his anthropological writings, published in 1913 – as did contemporary work by other analysts on boys with animal fixations, like Little Arpad, whose obsession with roosters was the subject of a case history by Sandor Ferenczi, also published in 1913.

To formulate a general theory to account for his repeated observations of animal phobias and animal identifications in children (and in childhood memories of adult patients), Freud in Totem and Taboo turns to the late Victorian discourse on totemism, especially the works of McLennan, Frazer, and Robertson Smith.⁴⁹ For speculations on the social organization of early human society, he also turns to Darwin, whose The Descent of Man argues on the analogy of present-day great apes, that early humans lived in polygamous groups dominated by a single male.

In fact, while in Freud’s work and in psychoanalysis more generally the topic of species identity appears under theorized, his work nonetheless attributes a preoccupation with the concept of species to his subjects, just as earlier writers on the totem did to the “primitive” cultures they studied. In this final section, I will argue that totem theory in Freud, as in its nineteenth-century originators, works as a theory of species and population that does not know itself as such.⁵⁰

Without explicit acknowledgement of the fact, Freud’s case histories show how children come to understand sex, death, and birth by observing animals. Freud is explicit on the kinship children feel with animals, writing in Totem and Taboo that they

In the slightly later “A Difficulty in Psychoanalysis,” Freud likens the kinship children and totem societies feel with non-human animals to the kinship between species theorized by Darwin:

Freud’s writings on totemism and on children’s relations with animals thus obey a double logic. On the one hand, in discussing the kinship that totem worshippers and children feel with non-human animals, Freud views them as grasping a truth that the “arrogance” of civilized adults conceals, and from which it was given to Darwin in making his discovery to lift the veil of repression. And as we will see, Freud views animals as the legitimate teachers to children of facts that adults keep from them. On the other hand, Freud also views children’s identifications with non-human animals and sense of kinship with them, as well as totem societies’ claims of kinship to animals, as wholly symbolic – that is, as disguised representations of real relations of kinship within the human nuclear family.

The fullest account in Freud’s work of a child’s relations with animals occurs in his case history of “Little Hans,” published in 1909. Freud met the boy Hans only once, and most of the case material comes from notes taken by his father, who was a follower of Freud’s. The events of the case history begin when Hans is four, and they show that he carefully observes and has strong affective relations with many animals around him. Most notable is his interest in the carriage horses and cart horses he sees outside his home in Vienna and encounters on his walks; zoo animals, including lions and giraffes, also preoccupy him, as do farm animals he encounters during trips to the country. Hans identifies with the horses he sees and plays at being a horse (10:52, 58). The critical event of his life in the period narrated in the case history is the birth of a sister when Hans is three and a half. As a result of his observation of his new sister, as well of his mother, and also in consequence of his mother’s threat to have his penis cut off if he played with it, the boy becomes deeply preoccupied by the difference between beings with penises and beings without, seeking out animals with penises, notably horses, and the lion and the giraffe at the zoo. As Freud observes, his investigations enable him “to come at genuine abstract knowledge” (10:9), though it at this point only concerns the difference “between animate and inanimate objects,” inasmuch as “a dog and a horse have widdlers [wiwimacher]; a table and a chair haven’t” (10:9). In the course of the events narrated in the case history, however, the boy is brought by repeated assurances from his father to accept that his mother and sister do not in fact have penises, and to recognize the penis’s significance as a marker of sexual difference.

In the wake of his sister’s birth, Hans’s fascination with horses and their genitals is supplanted by a horse phobia, which confines him to the house owing to fear that a horse will bite him (10:22). The analysis leads to the quite plausible conclusion that that the boy’s at once phobic and identificatory relation with horses symbolizes his ambivalence towards his father. Perhaps predictably, we learn much less about Hans’s attitude to his mother; nonetheless, his researches do not only concern his father’s role in his sister’s birth, but also hers. He treats his parents’ story that she was brought by the stork with derision; he seems to identify the sounds he heard during the birth (he was in the house at the time) with the sounds made by a horse falling down in the street (10:66, 135); he imagines her birth on the analogy of a chicken laying an egg (10:85).

Freud interprets little Hans’s researches as motivated solely by curiosity about the relations between his parents and about his sister’s birth. At the close of the case history, notwithstanding his researches, the boy remains effectively ignorant about the facts of sex and childbirth. His phobia has receded, though, and – for Freud these events are causally linked – he has “got on to familiar terms” with his father (10:144); there is no suggestion that he any longer identifies with horses, or that he is any longer obliged to displace onto them the fear and aggression he felt towards his father. For little Hans, in Freud’s view, the resolution of his neurosis brings about the end of any need to symbolize his relations with actual kin through his relations with animals.

So too in Freud’s essay on totemism, the supposed totem stage of human beings’ development as a species is a mere means of symbolizing a general cultural ambivalence towards the memory of the primal father, whose murder Freud postulates as the founding event of human history. Totem and Taboo’s narrative of the development of the species is more open-ended than the individual case of little Hans; in Totem and Taboo, there is no implication that the cultural transitions from totem worship to polytheism to the monotheistic religions, and thence to Christianity are progressive, or curative – Freud does not view the history of religion as affording a gain in knowledge or a lifting of repression. There can be, in Lacan’s term, no Real father, but only a series of symbolic substitutions for the dead primal father, in which the role played by animals in totemism is later played by different kinds of anthropomorphic deity and by other cultural heroes.

Our question is, does the relation with non-human animals have any particular privilege, or ontological independence, that would distinguish it in Freud’s view from, say, religion as a mere illusion, having no reality independent of the paternal relation of which it is a disguised representation? To answer the question, we recall that Freud takes from Victorian totem discourse the central claim that totemism is a system of kinship as well as a religion. Unlike most succeeding religions (with Christianity being the exception and – to Freud’s mind – in this respect a regression) it answers the question, “who are my kin and what do we share in common?” On the answer to this question totem societies were supposed to have based a law of exogamy that elaborated the single law of the primal father into a social system and established the historical progenitor of every subsequent system of human kinship. In taking over this claim from his Victorian sources, Freud reproduces the fundamental incoherence of their idea of kinship. Totemism requires the idea of species: the totem itself is defined as a species of animal (or, less often, of plant), but it also defines an idea of kinship that is constituted by the crossing of species lines.

In Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, the central topic is the constitution in philosophy of the human in a relation to animals that remains unacknowledged. Derrida argues that the human comes into existence as a follower of animals (the French je suis signifies both “I am” and “I follow”). Conjoined with this general claim is a specific argument that the trace – a key motif in Derrida’s work since Of Grammatology – is proper to the animal: it is animals who leave traces and it is given to the animal to follow the trace.⁵¹ For Derrida, speaking at a conference on “The Autobiographical Animal,” the autobiographer who writes “I am” is necessarily an animal in pursuit of an animal, an animal whose own animality eludes it.

A final thematic in this work, that of nudity, also at issue in autobiography where it is the task of the autobiographer to present himself or herself stripped bare, will concern us less. Here too, for Derrida, the problematic of the human relation to the animal is made manifest, since it is when naked that the human being assumes the condition of an animal – and yet, as Derrida writes, we do not say of non-human animals that they are naked.

I give these theoretical points of reference because psychoanalysis, as Freud’s case histories show, is very much a practice of autobiography. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, the critique of psychoanalysis is a major part of Derrida’s argument, but he says little about the case histories or about Totem and Taboo – though he does refer in passing to the animality of the absolute father, collapsing the distinction between the totem as symbol and the murdered primal father whom Freud supposes to be the person symbolized.⁵² Much of what follows expands on this throwaway suggestion of Derrida’s.

There is certainly every reason to extend Derrida’s claims about the structuring presence of the animal/human divide in autobiography to the practice of psychoanalysis. In his first psychoanalytic case history, Freud begins by stating that inability to tell their own stories is characteristic of neurotic patients:

Freud goes on to assert that the theoretical significance of neurotics’ inability to tell their stories is that it shows the operation of repression; the lifting of repression in the course of analysis that alleviates the patients’ symptoms therefore also fill in the gaps in their memory.

Analysis then consists in uncovering and following a path. The figure of the path in this sentence is ambiguous in its meaning, referring at once to the psychoanalytic method followed by the therapy and to the narrative of the patient’s life that it uncovers.

There is a similar ambiguity in Freud’s assertion that an “unbroken case history” emerges “towards the end of treatment” – what is the relation between the history that emerges in analysis, presumably as a product of the patient’s memory, and the case history we are reading, the history of the analysis, in which it is narrated from a position of retrospect outside it?

Throughout Freud’s work, his own discourse can be observed to double that of his patients, and to be subject to pressure and deformation by some of the same mechanisms of symptom formation. Freud himself observed this, and the topic is a staple in commentary on his work.⁵³ I raise it here to preface the claim that Freud’s own stories, like his patients’, leave “gaps unfilled and riddles unanswered” (7: 16), i.e., leave the path – especially when they deal with the relations between human and non-human animals.

Before concluding with a return to Totem and Taboo, I want to consider another of Freud’s case histories in which the analyzand’s relation to animals plays a key role. Freud published the case history of the “Wolf Man” in 1918, five years after Totem and Taboo – though the analysis it narrates took place from 1910 to 1914 and included the period of Totem and Taboo’s composition and publication in 1913; in spite of the delay in publication, the Wolf Man case history was written in 1914. Like that of little Hans, the Wolf Man case history has an animal phobia at its center, though in this case, the phobia is directed against animals that the patient had very probably never encountered in real life, and stem from an anxiety dream he experienced at the age of four.

In this anxiety dream, the patient recalled,

The way this dream is narrated makes it a dream within a dream, since it begins with the child in his bed, dreaming that he is in bed, then seeing the window opening – the only action in this dream where otherwise all the actors are motionless – as a kind of raising of the curtain to the main dream. The dream is in a sense already a dream of a dream – a point underscored by Freud’s report that “in the course of the treatment the first dream reappeared in innumerable variations and new editions” (18:36).

Also extant in many variations and editions is the Wolf Man’s visual rendering of his dream, the first version of which he made for Freud during the course of the analysis. Later in his life – having lost his inherited fortune during the Russian Revolution – the Wolf Man sold paintings to make money, including multiple versions of the original drawing rendered in oil. Each of these renderings might be described as a Wolf Man “original.”⁵⁴

The relation between representation and original in the context of the Wolf Man’s dream is thus far from straightforward. Freud’s interpretation – perhaps the most controversial and brilliant of his dream interpretations – nonetheless focuses on the task of discovering the original event that the dream represents. As I have noted, there is no reason to think that the almost five-year-old Wolf Man had ever seen a wolf; the immediate sources for his dream, it rapidly emerges, were fairy tales. The patient right away produces a reference to a story told him by his grandfather, of a tailor who caught a wolf by the tail and pulled it off, whereupon the whole pack chased him up a tree, led by the maimed one (17:30–1). The patient also recalled a picture of a wolf in a book of fairy tales of which he was “terribly afraid” at the period of the dream (17:29). But the most important originals of the wolves in this dream belong to other species altogether. As the text of the dream notes, the wolves are white and have bushy tails. The analysis links these traits to animals that the patient has actually met with – sheep, as the putative source of the wolves’ whiteness (though this will turn out to be overdetermined), and sheepdogs, as the source of their bushy tails.

From Freud’s interpretation of this dream, I wish to refer only to one strand, certainly the most important, and also the most equivocal in its conclusions. Recalling that one source for the dream material was the story of a tailor chased into a tree by a pack of wolves, Freud observes that this image appears in the dream in inverted form – in the patient’s dream, the wolves are in the tree, not below it. Treating the dream, as he characteristically does, as an aesthetic object with its own immanent principles of formal unity, he proposes that the transposition of key terms is in this dream a general rule. Thus, a scene in which “the wolves sat there motionless; they looked at him but did not move” would symbolize

The ensuing analysis shows that the dream (occurring on Christmas Eve – which was also the eve of the patient’s birthday) had as one of its determinants the child’s anticipation of the gifts he was to receive the next day, some of them hanging from the Christmas tree. The gifts turn to wolves because the boy in a homosexual phase of the Oedipus complex associates receiving gifts from his father with receiving sexual satisfaction from him. Freud thus reads the picture in the dream as a distorted version of a sexual scene; in the course of the analysis, on the basis of the patient’s associations but without any direct corroboration from his memory, he constructs the scene that is represented in his patient’s dream: “What sprang into activity that night out of the chaos of the patient’s unconscious memory-traces was the picture of copulation between his parents, copulation in circumstances which were not entirely usual and were especially favourable for observation” (17:30). In fact, Freud proposes, at the age of one and a half, the child woke from a nap in his parents’ bedroom to witness their “coitus a tergo [from behind], three times repeated; he was able to see his mother’s genitals as well as his father’s organ; and he understood the process as well as its significance” (17:37).⁵⁵

This so-called primal scene [Urszene] originates the Wolf Man’s neurosis – and, from a formal point of view, much of the remainder of Freud’s discussion consists of attempts to prevent it from being enfolded into the narrative at whose beginning it supposedly stands. The passage I have just quoted seems to close with the assertion that the one-and-a-half-year-old observer of his parents’ intercourse “understood” what he observed; to this assertion, though, there is a note: “I mean that he understood it at the time of the dream when he was four years old, not at the time of the observation. He received the impressions when he was one-and-a-half; his understanding them was deferred” (17:38–9).

The principle of deferred action [nachtraglichkeit] arises in all of Freud’s case histories; in that of the Wolf Man, it operates across the distinction between the human and the animal: the anxiety dream of the wolf is the form in which the boy’s deferred understanding of his parents’ sex appears to him. But even this equivocal claim that the sex of human beings is the origin of the boy’s knowledge and of the neurosis that follows is qualified as the case history develops. In addressing what he anticipates will be his readers’ scepticism about the highly particularized scene that he constructs on the basis of his patient’s symptoms and associations, Freud suggests an alternative: that the dream of the wolves staring at the boy is an inverted representation of his observation, not of his parents, but of other animals.

Subsequently, Freud admits that every time he has been able in analysis to bring out a scene in which the subject observed his parents having sex, it had the “peculiarity” (17:59) that the parents perform what he discreetly names in Latin as “coitus a tergo, more ferarum [coitus from behind, in the manner of beasts]” (17:57).⁵⁶ This fact suggests, as Freud allows, that the primal scene “is only a phantasy, which is invariably aroused, perhaps, by an observation of the sexual intercourse of animals” (17:59). Invariably … perhaps. Here Freud pauses the argument, returning to it at the analysis’ close, where further material – to which the patient is led by dreaming of a butterfly – gives him evidence enough to reassert the reality of the primal scene and to affirm once and for all that in the patient’s animal phobia, the wolf is a substitute for the father (17:112).

Perhaps. In making this claim Freud also takes the opportunity to link his findings in the Wolf Man’s case to anthropological argument of Totem and Taboo. There too Freud interprets non-human animals – the animals putatively worshipped as totems at an early stage in the history of every human society – as symbols of the father, and the taboo on killing the totem as atonement for the supposed primal murder. The work of Freud’s text consists in uncovering the traces of the father-animal’s murder: “An event such as the elimination of the primal father by the company of his sons must inevitably have left ineradicable traces [unvertilgbare Spuren] in the history of humanity; and the less it itself was recollected, the more numerous must have been the substitutes to which it gave rise” (13:155). In Freud’s rendering of historical memory in this work, totemism, like all of the other religious and cultural institutions he discusses, institutes both the repetition of the primal murder and the act of atonement for it. It is not too much to say that in Freud’s work the human as such comes into being with the radical ambiguity of the trace – an ambiguity that this text does not fail to reproduce as it uncovers and recovers the singular event of the primal murder. In referring to the event, Freud’s writing makes a radical shift in diegetic mode, from argument to narration, as if stumbling onto a track. Thus having asked in the mode of argument how totem societies “composed of members with equal rights … subject to the restrictions of the totem-system” (13:141) could have emerged from the “primal horde [Urhorde]” theorized by Darwin⁵⁷ – in which a single male keeps all the females for himself, driving away his sons as they grow up – Freud answers with a story: “One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured the father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde” (13:141). To the words “one day,” though, Freud appends a note: “To avoid possible misunderstanding, I must ask the reader to take into account the final sentences of the following footnote as a corrective to this description” (13:141n1). These sentences, in turn, attribute a “lack of precision” and “abbreviation of the time factor” in the body of the text to “reserve necessitated by the nature of the topic.” The note concludes that “it would be as foolish to aim at exactitude in such questions as it would be unfair to insist on certainty” (13:142n.1).

In its halting gait, its recourse to unspecified grounds for “reserve,” and its equivocation about the eventuality of the event it describes – about whether or not it happened and whether or not it was repeated – this passage resembles nothing so much as the end of a vampire story. It is no weakness in psychoanalysis that its theory of human culture centers on a traumatic kernel, whose unnarratability the theory is doomed to enact as well as to describe. Quite the contrary. My intent in this chapter has only been to notice how consistently this traumatic kernel is associated with the concept of species and with species difference. Freud has no account of why for little Hans and the Wolf Man the traumatic encounter with the parents’ sex should be symbolized by an entire species of animal, nor of why a species of animal is the form of the primal father’s return. Other than the breezy assertion that the brothers of the primal horde were “cannibal savages” (13:142) Freud offers no explanation of why the concepts of kinship and species should be so insistently linked to eating in his account of totemism, as in totem discourse more generally dating back to Robertson Smith. If, as I’ve argued here, totem discourse is a way of thinking about species, its preoccupation with diet should be related to the evidence we have seen from writers for children like Christina Rossetti and Lewis Carroll, that in the bourgeois societies of the nineteenth century – as, perhaps, in our own – there was a close connection between learning to classify animals and learning to recognize foods. For a child, the species chicken, pig, or lobster may first appear as something to eat, just as a child’s first models of sexual behaviour are likely to be animals. The point here is not the banal one that for the Victorians all forms of appetite were beastly, but rather that if in the nineteenth century, as Foucault proposed, human beings for the first time discovered themselves to be a biological species, this discovery required an identification with their animal counterparts. Besides the central role that non-human animals can play in children’s sexual histories, as evidenced in the cases of little Hans and the Wolf Man, Freud’s myth of the primal father and indeed the whole of totem discourse suggest that identification with something like meat, or something undead, forms an unacknowledged basis of human species-being.