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and Torok continue: "Around the age of four or five. . wheQ his
nurse left in turmoil, our patient must have had at least a basic
knowledge of English. This is confirmed in connection with Eliza–
beth, his subsequent nurse: She would read children's stories to him
in English. It was therefore plausible to look for foreign verbal
elements in his early dream material."
However, we know that Miss Oven, the English nurse, arrived
when the Wolf Man was three-and-a-half years old and left a few
months later. According to the evidence available in Gardiner's
book, Miss Oven was employed by the Wolf Man's family
only
dur–
ing the summer of 1890. His subsequent nurse, Miss Elizabeth, was
a Bulgarian woman, born in Russia, who read to the WolfMan and
his sister German and English fairy tales in
Russian translation.
By the
time Abraham and Torok wrote Chapter Three of their book, both
the English and the German editions of Gardiner's book were
available to them. Yet they disregarded the Wolf Man's claim that
the English fairy tales were read to him in translation. In his conver–
sations with Karin Obholzer, the WolfMan claimed repeatedly that
he did not learn or speak English. Obholzer's book is quoted by
Maria Torok in her Afterword, but neither she nor Nicholas Rand
defend the fundamental assumption that English is the Wolf Man's
childhood language.
Facts also contradict Maria Torok's interpretation in her Mter–
word, when she discusses Freud's "Dream and Occultism" (1932).
According to Freud, if someone would assert that the core of the
earth consisted of jam
[Marmelade
in German], then instead of in–
vestigating this jam hypothesis, we would ask ourselves "what sort of
person this must be who can arrive at such a notion." Then, Torok
goes on to:
. . . the rhyme conjured up by 'marmalade'. Marmolada is the
highest mountain in the Dolomites in northeast Italy where Car–
rara marble is quarried. It is also the place where Michelangelo
obtained the marble he used for his statues, for example his
Moses,
to which Freud devoted an entire essay.
But to assume that Carrara marble is quarried in Marmolada and
that Michelangelo went there for the marble there for his
Moses
is as
serious as the jam hypothesis. Michelangelo used white marble from
the mountains in the province of Carrara, and near Pietrasanta.
Carrara marble is quarried in Carrara, located in the Apuan Alps
