Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

 

2. 1914: One or Several Wolves?

 

 

Field of Tracks, or Wolf Line

 

That day, the Wolf-Man rose from the couch particularly tired. He knew 

that Freud had a genius for brushing up against the truth and passing it by, 

then filling the void with associations. He knew that Freud knew nothing 

about wolves, or anuses for that matter. The only thing Freud understood 

was what a dog is, and a dog's tail. It wasn't enough. It wouldn't be enough. 

The Wolf-Man knew that Freud would soon declare him cured, but that it 

was not at all the case and his treatment would continue for all eternity 

under Brunswick, Lacan, Leclaire. Finally, he knew that he was in the pro-

cess of acquiring a veritable proper name, the Wolf-Man, a name more 

properly his than his own, since it attained the highest degree of singularity

 

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914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? □ 27

 

in the instantaneous apprehension of a generic multiplicity: wolves. He 

knew that this new and true proper name would be disfigured and mis-

spelled, retranscribed as a patronymic.

 

Freud, for his part, would go on to write some extraordinary pages. 

Entirely practical pages: his article of 1915 on "The Unconscious," which 

deals with the difference between neurosis and psychosis. Freud says that 

hysterics or obsessives are people capable of making a global comparison 

between a sock and a vagina, a scar and castration, etc. Doubtless, it is at 

one and the same time that they apprehend the object globally and perceive 

it as lost. Yet it would never occur to a neurotic to grasp the skin erotically 

as a multiplicity of pores, little spots, little scars or black holes, or to grasp 

the sock erotically as a multiplicity of stitches. The psychotic can: "we 

should expect the multiplicity of these little cavities to prevent him from 

using them as substitutes for the female genital."

1

 Comparing a sock to a 

vagina is OK, it's done all the time, but you'd have to be insane to compare 

a pure aggregate of stitches to a field of vaginas: that's what Freud says. 

This represents an important clinical discovery: a whole difference in style 

between neurosis and psychosis. For example, Salvador Dali, in attempt-

ing to reproduce his delusions, may go on at length about THE rhinoceros 

horn; he has not for all of that left neurotic discourse behind. But when he 

starts comparing goosebumps to a field of tiny rhinoceros horns, we get the 

feeling that the atmosphere has changed and that we are now in the pres-

ence of madness. Is it still a question of a comparison at all? It is, rather, a 

pure multiplicity that changes elements, or becomes. On the micrological 

level, the little bumps "become" horns, and the horns, little penises.

 

No sooner does Freud discover the greatest art of the unconscious, this 

art of molecular multiplicities, than we find him tirelessly at work bringing 

back molar unities, reverting to his familiar themes of the father, the penis, 

the vagina, Castration with a capital C... (On the verge of discovering a 

rhizome, Freud always returns to mere roots.) The reductive procedure of 

the 1915 article is quite interesting: he says that the comparisons and iden-

tifications of the neurotic are guided by representations of things, whereas 

all the psychotic has left are representations of words (for example, the 

word "hole"). "What has dictated the substitution is not the resemblance 

between the things denoted but the sameness of the words used to express 

them" (p. 201). Thus, when there is no unity in the thing, there is at least 

unity and identity in the word. It will be noted that names are taken in their 

extensive usage, in other words, function as common nouns ensuring the 

unification of an aggregate they subsume. The proper name can be nothing 

more than an extreme case of the common noun, containing its already 

domesticated multiplicity within itself and linking it to a being or object 

posited as unique. This jeopardizes, on the side of words and things both,

 

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8 □ 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

 

the relation of the proper name as an intensity to the multiplicity it instan-

taneously apprehends. For Freud, when the thing splinters and loses its 

identity, the word is still there to restore that identity or invent a new one. 

Freud counted on the word to reestablish a unity no longer found in things. 

Are we not witnessing the first stirrings of a subsequent adventure, that of 

the  Signifier, the devious despotic agency that substitutes itself for 

asignifying proper names and replaces multiplicities with the dismal unity 

of an object declared lost?

 

We're not far from wolves. For the Wolf-Man, in his second so-called 

psychotic episode, kept constant watch over the variations or changing 

path of the little holes or scars on the skin of his nose. During the first epi-

sode, which Freud declares neurotic, he recounted a dream he had about 

six or seven wolves in a tree, and drew five. Who is ignorant of the fact that 

wolves travel in packs? Only Freud. Every child knows it. Not Freud. With 

false scruples he asks, How are we to explain the fact that there are five, six, 

or seven wolves in this dream? He has decided that this is neurosis, so he 

uses the other reductive procedure: free association on the level of the rep-

resentation of things, rather than verbal subsumption on the level of the 

representation of words. The result is the same, since it is always a question 

of bringing back the unity or identity of the person or allegedly lost object. 

The wolves will have to be purged of their multiplicity. This operation is 

accomplished by associating the dream with the tale, "The Wolf and the 

Seven Kid-Goats" (only six of which get eaten). We witness Freud's reduc-

tive glee; we literally see multiplicity leave the wolves to take the shape of 

goats that have absolutely nothing to do with the story. Seven wolves that 

are only kid-goats. Six wolves: the seventh goat (the Wolf-Man himself) is 

hiding in the clock. Five wolves: he may have seen his parents make love at 

five o'clock, and the roman numeral V is associated with the erotic spread-

ing of a woman's legs. Three wolves: the parents may have made love three 

times. Two wolves: the first coupling the child may have seen was the two 

parents more ferarum, or perhaps even two dogs. One wolf: the wolf is the 

father, as we all knew from the start. Zero wolves: he lost his tail, he is not 

just a castrater but also castrated. Who is Freud trying to fool? The wolves 

never had a chance to get away and save their pack: it was already decided 

from the very beginning that animals could serve only to represent coitus 

between parents, or, conversely, be represented by coitus between parents. 

Freud obviously knows nothing about the fascination exerted by wolves 

and the meaning of their silent call, the call to become-wolf. Wolves watch, 

intently watch, the dreaming child; it is so much more reassuring to tell 

oneself that the dream produced a reversal and that it is really the child who 

sees dogs or parents in the act of making love. Freud only knows the

 

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