Gaslighting, the Double Whammy, Interrogation and Other Methods of Covert Control in Psychotherapy and Analysis by Theodore L. Dorpat

Author:Theodore L. Dorpat
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Jason Aronson, Inc.
Published: 1996-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Freud’s Primal Scene Interpretation of Pankejiff’s Nightmare

My aim here is to critically review Freud’s (1918) primal scene interpretation of a nightmare Pankejiff had when he was 4 years old and which he first told to Freud early in his analysis. He dreamed it was night and he was lying in a bed which had its foot toward a window. Suddenly, the window opened and Pankejiff was terrified to see some six or seven white wolves sitting on a big walnut tree in front of the window. They had big tails like foxes, and their ears were pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In terror of being eaten up by the wolves, he screamed and woke up.

Freud interpreted the dream as having been unconsciously derived from an earlier primal scene experienced when Pankejiff was 18 months old. According to Freud’s (1918) famous reconstruction, the patient, when he was 18 months old, woke up one afternoon at the peak of his malaria fever and watched his parents having coitus a tergo. While observing his parents’ genitalia, his father’s heavy breathing, and his mother’s facial expression, the guardedly passive baby resorted to having a bowel movement, which gave him an excuse for the screaming which interrupted his parent’s sexual intercourse.

There exists a consensus among those who have reviewed Freud’s writings, as well as Pankejiff’s later remarks about the dream and Freud’s interpretation of it, that Freud’s primal scene interpretation about the nightmare is most implausible. Blum (1974) expresses deep skepticism over Freud’s primal scene reconstruction. He reviewed Freud’s reconstruction of the Wolf Man’s primal scene at eighteen months with particular attention to the possible role of the infant’s malaria. There is good reason to doubt that an 18-month-old child could perceive or remember the details of his parents’ sexual activity while suffering from malaria and a high fever.

In his reconstruction of the Wolf Man’s primal scene, Freud (1918) insisted that the primal scene was one of coitus a tergo because, in Freud’s opinion, it “alone offers the spectator a possibility of inspecting the genitals” (p. 59). Freud was incorrect in his claim that the a tergo position allows a spectator an opportunity for viewing the genitals. Videman (1977) wrote, “The position a tergo is the least favorable to observe the female genitals, unless the child enjoyed the optimal position neither behind nor before the couple but at their very juncture” (p. 306). Mahoney (1984) concludes, “The amount of perceptual acrobatics in Freud’s reconstruction is staggering, for the observability assigned to the Wolf-baby’s angle of vision would exceed the ingenious staging of any pornographic film producer” (p. 52).

Mahoney (1984) and others describe the “climate of suggestion and mutual deception” (p. 117) in which both the analyst and the patient accepted a bizarre conception of a physically impossible primal scene. (For a similar interpretation, see Videman 1977).

Mahoney suggests that Freud’s case history about the Wolf Man’s nightmares and his primal scene reconstruction is mainly and unconsciously Freud’s own dream and his concerns about the primal scene.

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