Hunger of the Wolf (15 page)

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I wandered into the park. All celebrity interviews end in disappointment, of course. You're supposed to encounter a person; instead you strike a deal, both sides making various arrangements with competing vanities. I had asked her about Ben and she had told me about the women around him. I had asked her about Alberta and she had given me Champlain. In my manifold failure, I sat beside Shakespeare's statue and tried to draw a connection—any connection—between the properties of zinc and a family of wolves.

No connection came. My interview with Poppy, my growing sense of the Wylies as a whole, had been, from the beginning, a movement backward, and not in the revelatory sense of heading upstream toward some mysterious source at whose origin all would be explained. They put me back in my childhood bed and covered me in heavier and thicker and darker blankets. Poppy was the living flesh of the men whose dusty papers I shoveled and sifted, and from her I had learned nothing. But that nothingness, I came to realize as I looked up at Shakespeare's bird-shit-streaked forehead, contained the most vital lesson of all. The Wylies didn't understand themselves. They knew no more about the meaning of their story than I did, probably less. They were not in possession of a secret that I could take from them. We shivered together in the same mystery—the wilderness that extended infinitely within them.

The contours of my obsession changed after the Poppy interview but its force remained. I had rung the tuning fork but couldn't find the spot to hold its meaningful vibration against: To North Lake or Champlain? To Dale or George or Ben or Poppy? To New York or China? To the moon? Anyway, I still had a story to write, and my interview with Poppy would serve that function well enough: I had my two quotes and a description at least. I could say that she had “deflected my questions about her brother's death.” I sussed out a few other grains of mild significance as well. I remembered Poppy had said that her parents were not “the kind for therapy.” A subsequent afternoon at the library coughed up the Winter 1958 issue of
The Journal of Pastoral Psychology
. George would have been twenty-four in 1955, living in Boston.

A Report of Lycanthropy as a Narcissistic Delusion:

The Case of G

By Roman Blom

Initiation of the Case

In 1955, during the course of ordinary practice, a quiet, respectable young man approached my office without referral. Having no familiarity with the psychoanalytic process, he initially had great difficulty expressing his reasons for seeking treatment. Following standard practice, I refrained from offering G any means of flight through social pleasantries, although his patience was immense, a fact which I interpreted as a sign of the strength and profundity of his psychopathology. Toward the end of our seventh session, he overcame his embarrassment and confessed to me the reason for his visits. He suffered the delusion of lycanthropy. At the time of the full moon, he tied himself in the basement of his house with a stout
leash and brayed at the moon. These episodes typically lasted three days and three nights.

The delusion was not limited to himself or his own ego-creation. He believed that his father was a werewolf and his grandfather and his uncle had also been werewolves. His family had controlled their condition, over the course of generations, by means of physical restraints and occasional “holidays” in a family cottage in the woods of Canada, where their lupine nature was permitted wider scope. The reason G had sought treatment was in hope of a cure for his “condition.”

The patient proposed a course of hypnotic suggestion. For obvious reasons, I considered the treatment a null option. I mooted behavioral treatment, a common approach for severe psychosis, in which category lycanthropy typically falls. G's lycanthropy was quite circumscribed, however, and the harm therefore more limited, opening more traditional avenues of the “talking cure.” The patient complained that his condition required isolation three days a month. He complained also that the transformation into the wolf was painful, often leading to blackouts. His secret wolfishness was the source of a deeper malaise and alienation, too; he worried that he could never be understood because of his condition. Despite the normalcy of lycanthropy in his own house, he was worried about how it might affect his capacity to have a relationship with a woman. He confessed that, at the time of our interview, he remained a virgin, and his primary reason for seeking counsel was that he doubted he could be intimate with a woman, either physically or emotionally, until he understood and conquered his “beast.” I suggested to him that maybe he should find a woman who enjoyed his beastliness. He doubted such a woman existed. I assured him they did. He admitted that he probably would not want a woman who wanted him as a wolf.

The Patient's Milieu and Childhood

The patient developed within a mostly normal family environment and had revealed no tendencies toward psychotic manifestations, either in school or at home. He was born in a well-to-do family in the environs of Pittsburgh and had no criminal past. His father traveled on business frequently. The primary family unit included a grandmother and a great-aunt who aided the mother. No servants were ever hired even though the family could easily afford them. His explanation, which he clearly believed, was the need for secrecy about the wolf. The women of the household almost never vacated the family mansion, either, not even for shopping. This self-sequestration sprung from the same source, according to G: the family's lycanthropy. When I asked if they had left their house before his father had made a fortune, he acknowledged that they had. “That's what money is for,” he told me. “So you don't have to deal with a lot of people.”

As a boy, G was educated at an all-boys' school in the city during the week. He spent the weekend at home. This bifurcated status of home life and school life, in which the former was exclusively feminine while the latter was exclusively masculine, led me to a conjectured diagnosis of lycanthropy as a repressed expression of the fear of castration, as found in Freud's famous Wolf-man case:

It would seem therefore that he had identified himself with his castrated mother during the dream, and was now fighting against that fact. “If you want to be sexually satisfied by Father,” we may perhaps represent him as saying to himself, “you must allow yourself to be castrated like Mother; but I won't have that.”

Following this line of inquiry, I concentrated in our biweekly sessions on his relationships with his mother and his grandmother.
They were stern but loving women. G's father was “a visitor in the home,” returning to be locked up during the nights of the full moon.

Around this stage of our therapeutic process, the patient described a repetitive dream which became very useful in our analysis. In his dream, which had begun in childhood, he was a wolf, exactly as in his monthly delusion, a red-tinged brown timber wolf. He runs across a field of snow, looking backward and forward, and as he runs he cannot tell whether he is chasing or being chased. When he realizes that he cannot tell whether he is chased or chasing, the patient wakes. This dream was the clearest initial sign that the patient's condition had more than one cause. The dream implies a fear and a wish simultaneously, a wishful fear and a fearful wish, embodied in the doubled desire of the wolf.

I then began to investigate the milieu of the patient's relationship to his father, who was for the most part a ubiquitous absence in G's young life. His father was a successful self-made millionaire who suffered many years of hardship and “life on the road” before his years of triumph. This led me to the diagnosis of lycanthropic expression as a way of reasserting a bond by mechanism of fantasy. I enquired with the patient if his lycanthropic incidents were completely regular, to which he replied that they were, although, on reconsideration, he believed that his uncle and his father had experienced a period of prolonged wolfishness during a stay in the wilds of Canada. This period in family lore was vague, almost never discussed, as it represented a financial and personal failure for the brothers. It was also revealed during our discussions that the brothers, the patient's father and uncle, shared a bed as children. The uncle was also a murderer. He had killed a man in a dispute over a dog.

My suggestion of possible incest and the repression of incest were treated as entirely risible, which I noted as a possible instance of repression. In a different session, the patient's tongue had slipped in the classic sense when he incorrectly called his uncle by a similar-sounding name belonging to a famous homosexual actor. When I noted the parapraxis, the patient merely shrugged, claiming that he had not heard the rumor about that actor, which was nearly impossible as G's business involved a familiarity with current events.

For the father, for his uncle, and for the patient, the onset of lycanthropic incidents occurred simultaneously with the onset of puberty and therefore must be related to the release of sexual life in the genital zone. Other signs pointed to the repression of illicit sexuality as a root case in the cathexis of G's delusional lycanthropy. The patient, on following the practice of dream recovery, noted that his recurring dream of being a wolf had begun at his private school. This school is notorious in the Pittsburgh area for its various pedophilia scandals.

We had made substantial progress, although admittedly without the satisfaction of a complete diagnosis, when I made a significant medical error. I scheduled an appointment during the full moon, at the discovery of which G accused me of not taking his condition seriously. My jarring misstep recalled to him that his purpose in seeking treatment had not been to investigate the causes of a delusion but to cure himself of what, in his mind, constituted a “real,” i.e., material, transformation. He accused me of indulging my own curiosity. Following the standard therapeutic model, I assured him that I believed his delusion, but he clearly no longer trusted my good faith. He wanted me to accept the “reality” of his condition. I explained that, due to the method, I could
neither accept nor deny the evidence. I explained that, in my psychoanalytic practice, the “real” is merely another therapeutic category. This answer failed to satisfy him.

Attention to the Dreamwork

Following my error, the patient began losing faith in the capacity of the therapy to release him from his “condition.” He increasingly desired to escape his recurring dream, which he described in plaintive terms: “I'm stuck. I can't tell whether I am running away from something or running to another thing. Do you see what I mean, Doctor? Am I running into somebody's arms? Am I running to eat? To sleep? It's the confusion that's so unbearable. It's the confusion that wakes me.”

We began to place the dream in the context of the fairy tale cognates, given the iconography of the wolf. The vast majority of the fairy tale dreams, as Freud has articulated, are the realization of simple childhood wishes. The nature of the wish kernelled in the patient's dream was confused, however, for the content of the patient's dream was exactly
the suppression of a wish
. In the dream, he was unable to ascertain the nature of his wish. The suppressed desire—in fact, the wish to understand his own wish—was the content of the dream. The desire he was suppressing was suppressed even in a dream. He had managed to remain secret even to his own unconscious. “That sounds like me,” he agreed when I suggested this diagnosis to him.

In an insight quite accidental to the dream life enquiries, the patient recalled one pleasure of his lycanthropic delusions: the experience of the women smoothing down his long-haired wolf flanks. He could also recall being fed raw meats of various kinds,
both beef and game. These new memories led to a novel conjecture, that the delusion was in fact a narcissistic expression of the genital libido, which caused the neurosis formation. The delusion and the dream were both responsible for deflecting the patient's entry into the world of men out of the world of women. The dream was a perfect encapsulation of the search for sex in a feminized world. The wolf symbolized his penis, the site of the expression of genital libido. He could not be sure whether the women were chasing him or whether he was chasing them. They were the completion of the summation of the patient's spectrum of desire.

From this insight into the nature of the dream, the problem of the root cause of the werewolf delusion was easily unlocked. The patient's lycanthropy manifested itself as compensation for the father's absence in prelibidinal life. Seeking to establish a tight bond with his absent father during the brief times of their togetherness, the patient imagined that he was leashed with his male relatives. This unity provided protection from the
vagina dentata
of an all-female household. The patient feared the absence of his father, and simultaneously feared being swallowed by the women of the household. Therefore he became a beast in the basement. What had been stalling us in our therapy was the simultaneity of the cathexis: the fear of castration and the fear of the absent father.

Conclusion and Supplementary Notes

The patient left analysis shortly after this breakthrough, prematurely in my view, claiming that he had been cured of his delusions and his dreams. He insisted on my assurance that the process of our therapy would be discreet. Profound delusion in a single symptom
may be connectable to dual cathexes in other cases. The key to the case was the series of paired oppositions that presented themselves, the father and the uncle, the dream and the delusion. The figure of the wolf, which itself bifurcated into a repetitive dream and a narcissistic delusion, stood as the connecting icon between these various paired opposites. The split of fantasy may itself be one of the figures of the fantasy. The hunger of the wolf feeds him.