The Wolf Man's Magic Language Analysis

Part II

II. a. Psyche: A Crypted Text

The challenge of hospitality is to extend an invitation to the other, in its otherness. The unanticipatable other, whose arrival puts into question one’s own belonging. To extend hospitality to madness, from the discourse of psychoanalysis, would require a closer attention to the absences in spoken language, to the hyphens and margins of the one’s speech. This demands that new avenues for interpretation be brought forward. To attempts to create spaces for the production of meaning, even when there seems to be none. Such a principle would be an acknowledgement of signification being construed, even in the face of apparent absence. The problematic is the establishment of the signification process itself, rather than analysing the existing meaning (Abraham & Torok, 1977, pp. li-lii).

In a very evocative text, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, re-read Freud’s Wolf Man case, a case which is as old as psychoanalysis itself. The foreword of this text is written by Jacques Derrida. Abraham and Torok, question the classical analysis

According to psychoanalytic theory, that which evokes fear in one’s own affective state, is usually hidden through repression or forgetting. The uncanny would refer to the re-turn of that which was forgotten. One’s own past, paradoxically, becomes the other. It is not anything new, but an estrangement of the familiar from the psyche because of repression. Perhaps, uncanny can be thought of in terms of a haunted house. A region of familiarity that is haunted by that which is unfamiliar. The uncanny is a return to a hidden secret, which wants to come back. This secret in its attempt to reveal itself, slowly colours the atmosphere, until one is confronted with the unfamiliar. A movement from hosting, to the hostile. How does one engage with this hostile other within