ABSTRACT
Iconic in psychoanalysis, the dream of the Wolf Man has served both the Wolf Man himself and the field as a site for both conservation and change. This dual aspect of the dream is embedded in Freud’s use of it to introduce the concept of nachtraglichkeit, with its double meaning of deferred action and apres coup. It is also a common feature of the recurrent dreams that emerge during an analysis. The author traces the use that the Wolf Man made of his dream, as a durable structure within which change could take place, in his successive analyses. Then using texts from the work of three analysts, Klein, Laplanche, and Blum, she shows the way each used the dream as an expression of both fealty to the past and a framework for change, linked for each to an individual model of temporality.
