Abstract
This article focuses on Freud’s view that the case of Sergei Pankejeff, commonly known as Wolf Man, is an example of an unsuccessful religious sublimation. Freud focuses on the efforts by Sergei’s mother and his nurse to educate him in the Christian faith. He points out that, although these efforts were successful in making him into a piously religious boy, they contributed to the repression of his sexual attraction to his father, the arrest of his psychosexual development, and to an obsessional neurosis reflected in blasphemous thoughts and compulsive acts of religious piety. The authors suggest, however, that there was one feature of his early religious behavior that reflected a successful religious sublimation and explain why it was successful. They conclude that even small children may experience a successful religious sublimation.
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Notes
In The Ego and the Id Freud (1923) pointed out that “due to the bisexuality originally present in children . . . a boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude towards his father and an affectionate object-choice towards his mother, but at the same time . . . displays an affectionate feminine attitude to his father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his mother. It is this complicating element introduced by bisexuality that makes it so difficult to obtain a clear view of the facts in connection with the earliest object-choices and identifications, and still more difficult to describe them intelligibly” (p. 33).
Freud’s concern here that the boy’s homosexual feelings toward his father are taking a passive (masochistic) form raises the role of the cultural or historical context in either inhibiting or promoting sublimations. If, as Freud makes clear in his writings on sublimation, there is a relationship between sublimation and cultural achievements, there may also be a relationship between sublimation and cultural attitudes. In this case, because passive homosexuality is considered a threat to masculinity, it is more likely to be viewed as a contributor to neurosis than as a means toward sublimation.
We have chosen not to discuss chapters 7 (“Anal Eroticism and the Castration Complex”) and chapter 8 (“Fresh Material from the Primal Period”) because these chapters do not have direct bearing on the issue of religious sublimation. Furthermore, because it elaborates on the reasons why the religious sublimation was unsuccessful, chapter 9 picks up where chapter 6 leaves off.
Because young Sergei kisses the holy pictures prior to going to bed, they may be thought of as functioning like “transitional objects” (Winnicott 1971). We are hesitant to say that they were, in fact, transitional objects for it is not normally the case that the child has multiple transitional objects. In addition, transitional objects are usually objects that are subject to tactile manipulation. In light of the fact that Segei’s kissing of the holy pictures may appear indistinguishable from the various obsessive thoughts and acts which he entertained and in which he engaged at the time, it is also useful to note Winnicott’s recognition of the fact that the transitional object may in some instances lend itself to “fetishism” or “the talisman of obsessive rituals” (p. 5). The possibility that the holy pictures were fetishes for young Sergei is certainly conceivable, but in his article on fetishism, Freud (1927) shows that the fetish usually derives from the child’s reaction to the observation of the anatomical differences between the sexes. For young boys, it typically has the shape of a penis and serves as a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it. We doubt that holy pictures on the wall functioned for young Sergei as fetishes in this sense.
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Carlin, N., Capps, D. Freud’s Wolf Man: A Case of Successful Religious Sublimation. Pastoral Psychol 60, 149–166 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-009-0212-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-009-0212-z