ABSTRACT
In 1926, the Wolf Man experienced a severe collapse while obsessively looking at an invisible hole in his Russian nose. What did he see? This is the question addressed by Freud in his famous 1927 essay on Fetishism, which opens with the “nose” and closes with the word “clitoris.” According to Freud “the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute.” What Freud saw in the fetish of the nose of his favorite patient was an equivalent of the woman’s penis, as if the Wolf Man had become the host of a dissociated part of himself. This fetish and “memorial” brings us back to the catastrophe from which psychoanalysis was born, namely, the place of Emma Eckstein’s circumcision and of its repetition on her nose. Freud could not recognize its traumatic meaning because the necessary categories of thought did not yet exist. Yet this fragment of reality is preserved in Freud’s mind, linked to his own unacknowledged trauma, unthought in his fantasies, his daydreams, his metapsychological speculations. Not only that, but at some point, this unacknowledged trauma becomes an erased trauma. The unthought then becomes the unthinkable which passes from one unconscious to another, being transmitted with all the series of uncanny effects recounted in this Brief Apocalyptic History of Psychoanalysis.
