The Wolves are Watching Us

This is one of the most famous dreams in the history of psychoanalysis, known as the Wolfman dream. Freud – after long years unsuccessfully trying to break through his patient's resistances – finally interpreted it as the disguised return of the primal scene: a sexual relation between the patient's parents, which he would have witnessed around one and a half years of age. The dream's analysis – developed by Freud in painstaking detail, down to the time of day when the alleged sexual act would have taken place (five o’clock in the afternoon) – is extraordinary, but here I am only interested in one aspect of this dream to which, paradoxically, Freud pays no particular attention: the animality of the wolves observing the dreamer. Freud's patient, Sergej Costantinovič Pankejeff, dreamt of some animals, either wolves or dogs. Though Freud talks of wolves, he never really considers them as such, but treats them as ‘symbols’ of something else (animals often appear in Freud's writings (see Stone 1992; Genosko 1993; Sauret 2005; Cimatti 2016), yet always as symbols).