Drawing the dream of the wolves

the long version

In a challenging new reading of Freud's case study of Serge Pankejeff, the "Wolf Man," Whitney Davis argues that the visual dimension of Freud's writing is crucial to an understanding of its structure and significance. Much of Freud's analysis revolved around Pankejeff's childhood dream of wolves and a drawing of this dream he made for Freud. Davis explores the drawing of the dream in Freud's interpretation of Pankejeff's "latent homosexuality," showing Freud's practice of making and using images to represent the history of persons and their sexuality. Davis also sets this case study in the wider context of Freud's evolving theoretical sexology and clinical work, his creation of psychoanalytic institutions, and his distinctive imagination of homosexual subjectivity.