ABSTRACT
This chapter considers what Anna Freud was to call, “a modification of the Oedipus complex”, that is to say the central importance Freud gives to the trauma of seeing and hearing the primal scene. “The Wolfman” went into analysis with Freud in 1910, when he was twenty-four, following a long period in a German sanatorium where he had been diagnosed as suffering from “manic depressive insanity”. Freud acknowledges “The Wolfman’s” sister plays “an important part in his life”, but it was because of the centrality he places on the role of the primal scene and the subsequent Oedipus complex, that he considers her seduction is not part of “The Wolfman’s” neurosis. In “The Wolfman” he seems to be working out the concept more fully with the idea that trauma in infancy remains repressed until some event in life activates an inappropriate response that is experienced as traumatic.
