Freud's Beasty Boys E-Book

Oxana Timofeeva

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 208

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

This book examines violence and sexuality after Freud. Its characters, though, are not women and men, but rather animals and children. Focusing on three famous Freudian cases in which little boys had issues with animals – Little Hans, The Rat Man, and the Wolf Man – it revises the role played by animals in male gender socialization.

Timofeeva demonstrates the relevance of psychoanalysis for anyone who wants to understand how patriarchy works, but she also points to its limitations. For Freud, sexuality creates the background of our psychic lives, and unconscious sexual fantasies are the origins of psychic disorders such as hysteria, obsessions and phobias. But what are the origins of sexual fantasies? 

Timofeeva argues that behind psychic dramas of sexuality there is something else: a mechanism of violence which she calls ‘the machine of masculinity’ and which she analyses both through Freud’s cases and through the lens of religion, anthropology and her own life experiences. Wolves, rats and horses are magical agents that connect us to the world of the dead – that is, to the history of our culture in which monotheism replaced totemic practices but the basic psychosocial matrix of turning love into violence continues to reproduce itself.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Notes

1 The Theater of the Soul

Notes

2 A Horse Is Being Beaten

Notes

3 A Rathole

Notes

4 The Number of Beasts

Notes

Bibliography

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Begin Reading

Bibliography

Index

End User License Agreement

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Freud’s Beasty Boys

Sex, Violence and Masculinity

Oxana Timofeeva

polity

Copyright © MSB Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin 2025. All rights reserved.

First published by Polity Press in 2025

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6842-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024943753

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Acknowledgments

I thank those without whom I would not have written this book: my teacher, Valery Podoroga (1946–2020), who gave me my first insight into Freud in Moscow in 1999; my adviser at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Katja Dieffenbach, who encouraged me to think about the number of beasts in 2010–11, the troika of philosophers from Ljubljana – Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, and Alenka Zupančič – who showed how to reconcile philosophy and psychoanalysis, and my friend Elena Kostyleva, who knows how many wolves there are. I also thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for granting me a fellowship, which allowed me to stay in Berlin for the seven months it took to complete this book in 2023, and Susanne Frank for being my host at Humboldt University for this research period. Finally, my gratitude is to those who were present to help and encourage me to keep on going: my family, friends, and animals (including the three hedgehogs that live under the porch of my cottage).

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.

See, on this, my essay: Oxana Timofeeva,

Это не то

[

This Is Not That

] (Saint Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, 2022), 68–93.

2.

The article under my name can still be found in the printed version of the journal: Oxana Timofeeva, Крысиная нора: Фрейд, Фуко и проблема изоляции [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 Handwashing” (

e-flux

, no. 119 (June 2021):

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/119/400227/rathole-beyond-the-rituals-of-handwashing

/)

1The Theater of the Soul

This book was written in the midst of a terrible war that tore my people apart. Some lost their jobs, families, friends, homes and homelands; others lost themselves. We were not prepared for this war; it came as a shock to us, and reduced all the diversity of life to the simplicity of death. Our population was divided into men and women, each group with its own task assigned to it by the rulers of the State: men – to be killed at war; and women – to give birth to new men. Other groups and individuals were forbidden, and those who shared different opinions or fell out of this binary code became illegal. The war – a triumphal march of the machine of masculinity – constitutes the background, but not the content, of this book. Also, behind this reflection is a nightmarish episode of my own biography, the memory of which does not allow me to understand, much less accept as destiny, the sexual difference in the form of the bad infinity of Eros and Thanatos imposed by the ideological apparatuses of the state.

As a teenager, I was sexually abused. At that time, I did not yet have any knowledge of sexuality and could not really understand what happened. The offence was reported to the police, and, after a long trial during which I had to give endless evidence of that traumatic episode, the man was sentenced to jail for thirteen years. I always thought that this term was not long enough for him. Moreover, I believed that there is no term that could be enough, and even life imprisonment would have been insufficient. It’s hard to forgive things like that; there is something unnatural about forgiveness. For my entire life I had to keep silent about that episode, because the general moral predisposition in the country where I lived implied that even if the man was in jail, it was me who was to blame. The possible stigma of being a bad girl could have ruined my socialization, studies, and future life.

This is certainly not something unique – many of my friends have been through something like this. In 2006 American activist Tarana Burke first used the phrase “Me Too,” which became a slogan for solidarity and sisterhood of all girls with similar experiences, and, starting in 2017, was used as a hashtag for the social movement against sexualized violence, harassment, and abuse. Shortly before the actual beginning of the #MeToo campaign, in 2016, a Ukrainian journalist Anastasia Melnychenko wrote a post on Facebook under another hashtag – #IAmNotAfraidToSayIt – in which she reported on her own experience of abuse, and which gave rise to massive campaigns with the same agenda in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.1 Thousands of people made public statements about having been sexually abused or harassed, and shared their memories of past traumatic events with varying degrees of severity – from a dirty look on the street or on public transport to actual or attempted rape – by strangers, spouses, parents, friends, relatives, friends of relatives, and relatives of friends.

The response to this wave of confessions has been ambivalent. Some pointed out that such discussion was long needed, that the level of aggression in society was extremely high, that the psychic trauma experienced by every second woman needed to be addressed, and that bringing it into the public arena was positive, emancipatory, and contributed to democratization of communities in contrast to the conservative and patriarchal values imposed by the ideological apparatus of states like Russia, where violence against women is the norm. The confessions had an avalanche effect: even those who had never experienced such things found unpleasant or dubious episodes in their biography to add to the common dossier. The variety of negative sexual scenarios resulted in thousands of written stories whose details some readers delved into with indignation, others with excitement. There is no way to deny the latter: the fact is that the victim borrows the words used to speak of sexualized violence from everyday language, which is already infected by this very violence and more suited either for porn or for the evidence she has to give before the court, as if to justify herself. Have you read such evidence, made up of detailed descriptions of the sequence of movements of the bodies? Have you ever provided such evidence?

The survivor keeps silent not only because she is afraid of being shamed, but also because the pain she has experienced has turned her speech into an unarticulated animal scream or made her mute and now, in order to perform a speech act, she has to use the same alien tongue that once tried to worm its way into her mouth or whispered offensive words in her ear. The therapeutic effect of her public confession depends on whether this tongue will be re-appropriated by her, whether it will now become her ally, whether it will help her to react and, through speaking out, to recover from the trauma suffered in the past and then pushed to the periphery of her mental life.

Theoretical discussion of psychic traumas resulting from sexual abuse began at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, the book Studies on Hysteria, written by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer in 1892, presents remarkable clinical records. It begins with a description of the case of Anna O. – a prominent feminist Bertha Pappenheim, who was a patient of Breuer. It was she who gave the name “talking cure” or “chimney-sweeping” to a method of therapy that was at the time completely new and experimental.2 Since antiquity, in accordance with etymology, the phenomenon of hysteria was often attributed to a “wandering uterus”3 and other physiological factors. As Paul Verhaeghe recounts in his book on hysteria and psychoanalysis:

Already in 2000 B.C., this theory was written down in a papyrus named Kahun after the place where it was discovered. It describes the uterus as an independent living organism. If not sufficiently irrigated, it becomes lighter and can start wandering around through the body, resulting in hysteria. Besides the number of very pragmatic tricks to get the uterus back to its proper place, the priest-doctors recommended marriage as a guarantee for the necessary “irrigation” that would keep the thing in its proper place.4

In Freud’s time, hysteria was a popular diagnosis, and many doctors, including Freud himself (before the invention of psychoanalysis), tried to treat hysterics with electrotherapy and hypnosis. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, is born from the creative union of a patient, recognized in her subjectivity, and an analyst; from her active desire to speak out, to unburden her soul, and the readiness of an analyst to hear and understand. The origin of hysteria lies in the psychic life of a person: it is not the uterus that wanders in the body of a hysterical woman, but rather a memory of an experience so unbearable that it cannot be accepted in consciousness, a memory repressed, suppressed or displaced. According to Freud’s initial hypothesis of the genesis of hysterical symptoms, it is this memory that indirectly causes arm and leg pain, cramps, tremors, syncope, and other symptoms: “Psychical trauma – or more precisely the memory of the trauma – acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work.”5 Psychic trauma is stuck in the body as a pathogenic agent for a long time: “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.”6

As noted by Verhaeghe: “Others had already observed that there was a traumatic etiology of hysteria. Nevertheless, Freud would be the first to listen to this trauma and to interpret it as having an effect on the psyche and hence on the soma.”7 After analyzing eighteen cases of hysteria, Freud concluded that the tormenting memories of the body referred to psychic traumas of a sexual character, with fear or agitation caused by irritation of the genitals in early childhood. Thus emerged the theory of seduction, according to which the origins of hysteria were traced back to nothing other than the sexual abuse of children, with the father figure looming over a vague image of an abuser in the memories of Freud’s first patients.

One of the cases addressed by Freud in the Studies on Hysteria is called “typical.” Its description takes only a few pages, as the analysis was unplanned and did not last more than a single session. In fact, it was not even a psychoanalytic session, but rather a random conversation with a young girl whom Freud met in the Austrian mountain resort of the Hohe Tauern, where he had come on holiday: “to forget medicine and more particularly the neuroses.”8 Finding out that he was a doctor, this young girl, Katharina (Aurelia Kronich) approached Freud in person and complained of the panic attacks she had been suffering from for the past two years. During the conversation, as if by chance, Freud suggested: “At that time, two years ago, you must have seen or heard something that very much embarrassed you, and that you’d much rather not have seen.”9 Katharina confirmed that about two years previously, when she was sixteen, she had discovered her uncle with her cousin, and noted that her first panic attack had occurred at the same time. After she had told her aunt about the incident, a family drama and a divorce ensued. In Freud’s understanding, what the girl actually meant by the ancle and the aunt was her father and mother. The “aunt” and Katharina moved away together, leaving the “uncle” alone with the cousin who, by that point, was already pregnant. This memory suddenly awakened in Katharina’s mind another experience from an even earlier period of her life. At the age of fourteen, she happened to have been sexually harassed by that very same “uncle”: one night he took the opportunity to crawl into the girl’s bed. She was frightened “feeling his body in the bed”10 without being aware of what was going on.

This description introduces a specific temporality to the genesis of hysteria. It is the belatedness of the symptom in relation to the first sexual trauma, which, according to Freud, makes Katharina’s case typical. She turns hysterical not right after being abused as a child, but only after she learns about sexuality: “In every analysis of a case of hysteria based on sexual traumas we find that impressions from the pre-sexual period which produced no effect on the child and attain traumatic power at a later date as memories, when the girl or married woman has acquired an understanding of sexual life.”11 A single trauma is not enough to trigger a hysterical symptom: a repetition is also necessary. The abuse or seduction happens more than once: first the child, who has no knowledge of sexuality and does not yet understand what is going on, is subjected to it – and then the adolescent, in whom the awakening of sexuality resurrects the memory of the traumatic episode, makes it truly pathogenic. Thus, the primary, original trauma occurs through the mediation of a second one, which Freud calls “auxiliary,” but which, as he states, has its own content and “deserves equally to be called ‘traumatic.’”12