ABSTRACT
The focus of this short, concluding chapter is Freud’s Wolfman (1918) in order to think about the racialising gaze, rendered here as white wolf. The overarching trope of this chapter is the cocoon, articulating the psychic reality of the racialised subject, which experiences itself as insectile or larval. The Wolfman, who is Russian and in therapy with a Jewish psychoanalyst, is not, at first sight, ‘epidermalised,’ to use Frantz Fanon’s word, but nonetheless ranked according to what Alfred J. López calls the ‘hierarchy of whiteness,’ applied to both analyst and analysand. The chapter thus reads Freud’s case study of the Wolfman to think about the racialised rendition of the I as insectile. While it looks at Wolfman in its specifically (interwar) Viennese context, it also to a certain extent breaks with that context to think about the later Nazi and neo-Nazi mythologisation of the wolf and, more generally, the terrorizing presence of the white phallic subject.
