Drawing the Dream of the Wolves

Whitney Davis argues that an unstudied dimension of Freud's writings visual or graphic dimensions crucial to understanding its structure and significance. "Drawing the Dream of the Wolves" offers a new and challenging reading of Freud's case study of Serge Pankejeff, the Wolf Man, on whom Freud conducted a complex psychoanalysis from 1910 to 1914. Much of the analysis revolved around the patient's childhood dream of wolves and a drawing of this dream made for Freud by Pankejeff and amateur artists in the first weeks of the analysis.Davis explores the role of the drawing of the dream in Freud's interpretation of the patient's latent homosexuality, showing that Freud based his decipherment of the drawing and, in turn, of the patient's sexual identity in part on his own established practices of making and using images to represent the history of persons and their sexuality. During the analysis, Freud interpreted the Wolf Man's childhood phobia and intense fear of wolves and his adult neuroses as having been the result of the little boy's latent homosexuality.
In fact, both Freud and the Wolf Man apparently used the analysis to reorganize and, as they thought, overcome their latent homosexualities. In addition to investigating this dynamic in the case and the case history, Davis sets it in the wider context of Freud's evolving theoretical sexology and clinical work, his creation of psychoanalytic institutions, and especially his distinctive imagination of homosexual subjectivity.