BOOKS
161
WHAT THE WOLF MAN SAID
THE WOLF MAN'S MAGIC WORD.
By
Nicolas Abraham and Maria
Torok. Translated by Nicholas Rand, with a foreword by Jacques Der–
rida.
University of Minnesota Press.
$13.95.
Sergei Pankeiev
(1886-1979),
also known as Freud's
"Wolf Man," later was analyzed by Ruth Mack Brunswick. Both
case histories together with the Wolf Man's autobiographical re–
marks and additional editor's notes are available in a volume edited
by Muriel Gardiner,
The WolfMan by the WolfMan
(1971).
After his
death, Karin Obholzer published her conversations with him in TIe
Wolf Man Sixty Years Later
(German version :
1980,
English transla–
tion :
1982) .
In
1976,
the Parisian psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and
Maria Torok reinterpreted this case from a new perspective in TIe
Wolf Man's Magic Word.
The translation, a volume in
17zeory and
History of Literature,
is introduced by the translator, Nicholas Rand,
and has an afterword by Maria Torok.
Abraham and Torok's interpretive model, 'Cryptonymy', at–
tracted the attention of Derrida . But not even he noticed a number
of mistakes in their interpretation . Some of these facts could have
been checked in Gardiner's book and others in Obholzer's.
The joint authors' method is based on retranslating the Wolf
Man's famous nightmare into a text, because they assume that the
Wolf Man had translated this text into the nightmare . Instead of
following Freud in tracing the Wolf Man's trauma to his witnessing
or fantasizing the primal scene, they focus their interpretation on the
words he must avoid:
. . . what is at stake here is not a
metonymy ofthings
but a
metonymy
of words .
The contiguity that presides over this procedure is by
nature not a representation of things not even a representation of
words , but arises from the lexical continguity of the various
meanings of the same words , that is, from the
allosemes,
as they
are catalogued in a dictionary . For TZARAPINA (scar), to
evoke
tieret
(to rub) , a form of lexical contiguity has to be in–
serted ."
In their
cryptonymy,
a split Ego is postulated to explain the in–
trasymbolic relationships of words. A given word must be under-
