finally, there is for me the most tragic case of freud’s. The Wolf Man, having too much money and too much secondary gain from his illness, cannot really pay, meaning he cannot make the sacrifice of his symptom in the name of his psychoanalysis. Money means nothing to him. He has too much fun living out a dependency on Freud, leading Freud to do something he’ll never do again. He forces termination. In three months, no matter what. Like a confession at gunpoint the Wolf Man reveals the keys to his neurosis, not least of which is a haunting primal scene, his parents doing it a tergo, his father’s penis magically appearing and disappearing into his mother’s bent-over body, the Wolf Man watching from a feverish afternoon nap as a child. His desire, sifted through this scene, is embedded in a nightmare of wolves in a tree outside his window peering at him with their castrating gaze. Freud’s transposition: Their gaze is yours, the window opened like your eyes that afternoon. But this forced remembering doesn’t work. The Wolf Man never really recovers his desire out from under this scene. A few years after his analysis ended, he believes his nose is disintegrating and walks carrying a mirror, transfixed by the image of what might disappear. He was analysed for the next sixty years, and, in a strange act of reversal, having lost all of his money after the two world wars, he became something of a charge for the psychoanalytic institution, paid seemingly for having been Freud’s famous patient. The painful denouement: he takes on the name that Freud gave him, publishing and painting not as Sergei Pankejeff but as the Wolf Man, merging with his case history.