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.
Development
1918
introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
In From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918)
Relations
- 1918 introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
Works
- 1918
From the History of an Infantile Neurosis
Freud's case history of the patient known as the "Wolf Man", a young Russian aristocrat. Rather than recounting the adult illness and its treatment as a whole, Freud concentrates on the infantile neurosis that lay behind it. The centre of the account is a childhood dream of white wolves sitting in a tree, which Freud traces back to the child's sight of parental intercourse, the primal scene, at the age of one and a half; the scene, he argues, acquired its meaning and its traumatic force only later, by deferred action. The case also examines the boy's animal phobia, his religious obsessions, his anal erotism and his castration anxiety, and reports Freud's decision to set a time limit to the treatment. Written in 1914 and published in 1918, it serves at the same time as a defence of infantile sexuality against the revisions of Jung and Adler.
See also
People
References
- From the History of an Infantile Neurosis1918Evidence for a relation