I Was a Teenage Optical Engineer

Lawrence Talbot, the Wolf Man of Universal horror films of the 1940s was played by Lon Chaney, Jr. Surprisingly, the character was an optical engineer in the original movie. He installed a telescope in the Talbot family home. In the original script, in fact, he is not even a relative of the family, but was brought in explicitly to install the telescope. Few things in a movie script are left to chance, but are either inspired by events, or else have some symbolic significance. Why did screenwriter Curt Siodmak settle upon someone in Optics for this role, when he might have used any profession as a means of inserting his character into the story?

Bringing the Dreamwork to the Picturebook

Combining cultural history with the insights of psychoanalytic theory, this article examines Maurice Sendak's Caldecott-winning and controversial Where the Wild Things Are (1963), arguing that Sendak’s book represents picturebook psychology as it stood in the early 1960s but also radically recasts it, paving the way for a groundswell in applied picturebook psychology. The book can be understood as rewriting classical Freudian analysis, retaining some of its rigor and edge while making it more palatably American. Where the Wild Things Are has been embraced as a psychological primer, a story about anger and its management through fantasy; it is also a text in which echoes of Freud remain audible. It is read it here as a bedtime-story version of Freud’s Wolf Man case history of 1918, an updated and upbeat dream of the wolf boy. It is to Sendak what the Wolf Man case was to Freud, a career-making feral tale. Standing at the crossroads of Freudian tradition, child analysis, humanistic psychology, and bibliotherapy, the article reveals how the book both clarified and expanded the uses of picturebook enchantment.

Anality in the Colonial Archive

This essay establishes points of contact between Sigmund Freud’s research on the anal-sadistic stage of infantile sexuality in the first decade of the twentieth century and the Irishman Roger Casement’s contemporaneous sexual practices in Peru while he investigated a colonial rubber enterprise for its gruesomely violent punitive practices against colonized peoples. The pairing of Freud and Casement elucidates a theory of colonial archivization evinced in Casement’s notorious Black Diaries and in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and “Wolf Man” case history. The author argues for a retooling of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic for archival work on queer pasts by sidestepping the familiar terrain of melancholic loss in favor of the ambivalent, defiant function of anal sexuality and its peculiar encryption strategy.

Micro-História e Psicanálise: Ginzburg discute o caso clínico Homem dos Lobos de Sigmund Freud

In search of a fruitful relationship between Psychoanalysis and History, this article aims to evaluate how Carlo Ginzburg, throughout his intellectual and academic career, discussed Psychoanalysis in the light of Micro-History. Thus, the work of Ginzburg Mitos, emblemas, sinais: morfologia e história was a rich source for this search. In the chapters Sinais: raízes de um paradigma indiciário and, especially, Freud, o homem dos lobos e os lobisomens, Ginzburg critically discusses Freud`s interpretations on his most important clinical case, a Russian patient named Serguei Constantinovitch Pankejeff (1887-1979), known as the Wolf man. Ginzburg recognizes the magnitude of Freud’s work, but he shows its limitations indicating that the author did not sufficiently consider his patient’s cultural background and gave a greater focus on individuation. Also, Ginzburg allowed demonstrating in his work the importance of Psychoanalysis in the development of the evidentiary paradigm concept, which is fundamental to Micro-history.