Concept
Primal scene
The scene of sexual intercourse between the parents, as the child observes it or imagines it from clues, and usually takes to be an act of violence. Freud made it central to the Wolf Man case, Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose (1918), where he reconstructed it from a childhood dream and argued that it became effective only later, by deferred action. Whether such scenes are real memories or fantasies he left open, counting the primal scene among the primal fantasies inherited by the species.
Read more- Broader concept
- Primal fantasy
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 1
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1918 In the Wolf Man case Freud reconstructs from the wolf dream a scene of parental intercourse observed at the age of one and a half and understood only later, names it the primal scene (Urszene), and asks whether such scenes are memories or primal fantasies.