Introduction

The theme of this book is violence and sexuality after Freud. Its characters, though, are not women or men, but animals and children. It mainly focuses on three famous Freudian psychoanalytical cases where animals are at stake - Little Hans, the Rat Man, and the Wolf Man - and revises the role played by animals in male gender socialization. I assume that beyond sexuality, which, according to Freud, creates the background of our psychic lives, there is a mechanism of violence implemented in the production of a social norm as we know it. I call it the machine of masculinity, but do not insist on this term - you can call it something else. It is a dynamic configuration that can be approached on different levels - psychological, anthropological, theological, or metaphysical. Without claiming to describe it exhaustively, I am trying to understand how it functions - either with Freud, or against him - using a few examples.

Some people think that Freud is outdated and that anyone who wants to understand modernity has to address more recent authors. Perhaps from the point of view of clinical psychology such statements make sense, but in philosophy no one ever becomes obsolete: although Freud was not a philosopher in the strict sense, his work opens up a speculative horizon that extends to infinity. Only prejudices can prevent us from returning to his cases and applying the elements of his analysis to our own cases today, to stories and situations of varying degrees of insanity.

However, this is not a scholarly work dedicated to a single author, but rather a somewhat elusive and divergent exercise in reflection, which I have been doing on and off over the past few years. With regard to Freud's discussions about girls with sexual fantasies or boys with animal phobias, I outline the contours of a very preliminary and far from systematic account, but still my own version of philosophical anthropology as it relates to the analysis (and self-analysis) of the human soul. The word "human" is, of course, conventional, and is used here only for the purpose of inviting everyone to apply such analysis to themselves. I do by no means intend to say that there is such a thing as a human soul different from the psyche of any other being. It would be better to speak of an animal soul - the self-analysis of our animal soul - not in itself, but in the context of Western culture with its particular scenarios of psychic drama played out over and over again at the intersection of fantasy and reality.

Up until 2023, I did not know that I was working on this book, but was simply addressing psychoanalysis with some philosophical questions from time to time. I've been interested in how the psychic and the social interact with one another, what unconscious cultural patterns we reproduce in sex, in politics, everywhere - and why we do that. The first step, now quite a long time ago, was a short paper on the Wolf Man case, which I presented at a seminar at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht in 2011. It was from this at that very chaotic presentation, focused on the topic of counting beasts not only in psychoanalysis but also in the Bible - in the Old Testament legend of Noah's Ark and the New Testament legend of the exorcism of demons - that the last chapter here, "The Number of Beasts," eventually grew.

Later, in 2016-17, the outline of the chapter that appears first here and is called "The Theater of the Soul," began to develop. In this chapter, which is not about boys, but about girls, I am trying to describe - also through a personal example - the psychosexual knot of trauma, sexualized violence, fantasy, shame, and high moral standards within which our society is ultimately entangled.1 It was difficult for me to write this chapter. It transgresses the boundaries - most of all my own - but I want it to serve as a sort of prolegomena to a philosophy of the girl that I would really love to be created someday by someone who would read and understand me properly. A disclaimer is needed here: in my work, any autobiographical material carries out certain conceptual tasks, but these are also moments of intrusion that break the theory rather than glue it together. Why shouldn't a theory be slightly broken? After all, this way it will be closer to what it theorizes.

In 2020-21, when the COVID pandemic caused terrible disruption worldwide, I turned to Freud again. Rereading his analysis of the obsessional neurosis in the Rat Man case, I drew attention to some parallels between social and psychic processes that occur in connection with external threats, such as the risk of infection, but also the threat of attack (structurally it is roughly the same thing; it is not by chance that the fight against the virus has been described as the war against an invisible enemy). Yes, the fear of contracting a deadly disease sounds rational, but if handwashing and other ways of creating protective barriers around ourselves turn into rituals that drive us into a frenzy, this might indicate that the real cause of our fear is not the virus, but something else - something that we are trying to forget, displace, or censor. This forgotten something, however, still has its proxy in our reality - say, a tiny animal that draws us into the darkness of the unconscious. We place the blame on this animal for all the sins, for spreading disease, bringing plague, and creating chaos: thus begins the hunt for rats (wolves, witches, and foreign agents).

Some of my reflections on these symptoms were gathered together in an article on the problem of isolation not only in Freud, but also in Michel Foucault's analysis of the mechanisms of power. The article was published in 2021 in a Russian philosophy journal. However, two years after publication, in the course of political purges and censorship in academic and cultural spheres, the editors removed my name (together with the names of some other authors whose profiles did not fit the official state ideological trends) from the journal's website, thereby, ironically, demonstrating the mechanisms discussed in that article. Erasing my name was just one of the many sanitary procedures to which little contagious beasties like me were subjected in Russia.2 After all, the deadly variety of passages between repression in the psychoanalytical, political, and merely police senses forced me to quit my position as a university professor and leave the country. In 2023, I ended up in Germany, where the title of this book - Freud's Beasty Boys - as well as the composition of the three Freudian cases emerged in my mind. It was then that I wrote the second chapter, "The Horse Is Being Beaten," about little Hans, a boy who was afraid of horses.

Those who are familiar with Freud's work will immediately guess that the title "A Horse Is Being Beaten" is a paraphrase of the title of his famous essay A Child Is Being Beaten, to which I do not refer directly, but there is certainly a connection between it and the cases analyzed here. Little Hans sees a horse being beaten, and his father calms him down, saying the horse does not feel pain. Before becoming afraid of horses, the child loves them, but he will grow up, become an adult man (a father), and learn to beat his own "horse" (someone defenseless) - or dominate in some other way - himself: this is the ritual. We might not recognize it as a ritual, but there it is: a surrogate victim mechanism, according to René Girard, or whatever else we might call the constitutive act of violence that sets the machine of masculinity in motion.

I discuss this machine in the context not only of psychoanalysis, but also of anthropology and the history of religion, highlighting in each individual psycho-scenario a "totemic moment," that is, a moment of encounter and communication (traumatic or not) with whatever one's animal may be. It can be a symbolic or real encounter of some kind in which an exchange takes place, an encounter that triggers a disturbance or brings us into the state of affect. I call the totemic the moment when, sometimes without realizing it, we identify with an animal, reflect ourselves in it, or exchange perspectives with it - as if our own soul had appeared to us from outside in the guise of that animal. Wolves, rats, and horses are magical agents that connect us to the world of the dead, that is, to the tradition, the history of our people and culture, in which monotheism replaces (and represses) totemic practices, but some basic psychosocial matrix of turning love into violence does not cease to reproduce itself.

Notes

1. 1. See, on this, my essay: Oxana Timofeeva, ??? ?? ?? [This Is Not That] (Saint Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, 2022), 68-93.
2. 2. The article under my name can still be found in the printed version of the journal: Oxana Timofeeva, ???????? ????: ?????, ???? ? ???????? ???????? [Rathole: Freud, Foucault and the Problem of Isolation], Logos, vol. 2 (2021): 1-28. A short version was published here: Oxana Timofeeva, "Rathole: Beyond the Rituals of...