Freud's Beasty Boys. Sex, Violence and Masculinity

With Little Hans, the Rat Man and the Wolf Man, Sigmund Freud, for whom sexuality forms the background of our psychic life, presented three case studies that remain classic to this day and which, with their combination of trauma, animal and child, contributed significantly to the development of psychoanalysis. But what, Oxana Timofeeva asks in her masterful reflections, which draw on religion, anthropology and personal experience, if her reading was clouded by the sexualized gaze of the adult analyst? If unconscious sexual fantasies are not the origin of psychological disorders, but something else lies behind the psychological dramas of sexuality: a mechanism of violence, a “machinery of masculinity”? By focusing her attention on the actual protagonists, namely the children, taking them seriously in their pain, in their openness and ability to empathize and identify with the animals, Timofeeva not only succeeds in shedding new light on the role of animals in male gender socialization and thus in the constitution of patriarchy. She also uncovers the animality that inhabits the core of human subjectivity.

“Extraordinary: Oxana Timofeeva discovers and analyzes the animality that inhabits the core of human subjectivity.” – Slavoj Žižek