Who is afraid of the big bad wolf

When we first met, he told me about an idea he had and it was of a forest. “I had an idea,” he said to me, “It happened while I was sitting on the train back to Munich.”

“Oh,” I replied and thought,  “Hmm, like a dream of the forest… that’s ok, I guess.”

I then nodded to myself. “So long as it is his dream. Because to be trapped in the dream of the other is to be fucked.” Parce que si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l’autre, vous êtes foutus.

Such is the well-known quote, occasionally seen on a hipster T-shirt. “Don’t be trapped in someone else’s dream,” it boldly forewarns in cursive font (oh how millennial of me born in 1980!). It is often mistakenly understood as a warning of living someone else’s life – of sharing their aspirations instead of finding your own. But the quote comes from a lecture Gilles Deleuze gave in 1987 at the FEMIS film foundation called “What is a creative act?”Discussing the notion of creativity in filmmaking, Deleuze suggests that the director Vincente Minelli too had an idea, and his idea is about dreams. He writes,

It is a simple idea – we can state it — and it is linked into a cinematographic process in Minnelli’s work. Minnelli’s great idea about dreams, it seems to me, is that they most of all concern those who are not dreaming. The dream of those who are dreaming concerns those who are not dreaming.

Deleuze is referring to films like The Pirate (1948), An American in Paris (1951), Lust for Life(1956) or A Matter of Time (1976) all of which concern the dreams and aspirations of the protagonists.  So for instance, in The Pirate, the young Judy Garland dreams of the excitement and adventure she would have to forsake when she marries the major of her town, the dull and elderly, Don Pedro. Gene Kelly, a circus performer, learns of her dream and adopts the identity of the pirate Macoco in order to make her fall in love with him. Meanwhile, unknown to her, Don Pedro is the real pirate all along. Her dream of an exciting life thus concerns those who are not dreaming, her fiancee and her would-be lover. Deleuze continues,

Why does it concern them? Because as soon as someone else dreams, there is danger. Namely, people’s dreams are always all-consuming and threaten to engulf us, and what other people dream is very dangerous, and the dream is a terrifying will to power, and each of us is more or less a victim of other people’s dreams. Even the most graceful young woman even when it’s a graceful young woman, she’s a horrific ravager, not through her soul, but through her dreams. Beware of the dreams of others…

In our example, becoming involved in the other’s dream has obvious dangerous consequences: Gene Kelly, who takes on the pirate’s identity, is then charged with the pirate’s crimes. But why is the dream dangerous in itself? Why would Judy Garland, then twenty five, but already mentally fragile and addicted to medication, be described as a horrible ravager? The answer demands a broader understanding of the Deleuzian project, in particular his sustained critique of traditional psychoanalysis in its use of the Oedipus complex as an explanatory model for the organisation of desire. Deleuze argues that there is danger associated with people’s dreams, which has to do with different interpretations of the unconscious.

We are back in the forest now, or at least among trees, specifically one walnut tree outside a boy’s bedroom.  As a child, Sergei Pankejeff – later known as the Wolf Man – dreamt of white wolves, not one but several, sitting on its leafless branches. There were six or seven wolves but in his drawing only five (details, details, Freud always paid attention to details!).During his analysis Freud reduces all the wolves to one, the big bad wolf, the father figure in the Oedipus complex. And the question that needs to be asked is, what is more terrifying then, the one wolf or several? The lone wolf or the pack?

If we believe Deleuze and Guattari, Freud is afraid of the pack. In his analysis of what became known as the Wolf Man case, he repeatedly focuses on the number of wolves in the dream and interprets accordingly. Thus the answer to the question of why were there six or seven wolves instead of one in Pankejeff’s dream, Freund finds in the story of “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats” familiar to his patient. In this story there are seven goats but only one wolf, who deceives the goats into letting him into the house by painting its paws white. Freud also learns that Sergei’s sister would tease him with an illustration from The Little Red Riding Hood, again featuring one Wolf. Indeed for Freud, there has to be the one wolf, because this represents the father and the threat of castration: Sergei remembers how when walking with his father (through a forest, perhaps?) the father kills a snake with a stick.

Deleuze and Guattari argue that in the interpretation of the Wolf Man’s dream, like in other essays such as “The Unconscious” or “Negation” or indeed, psychoanalysis in general, Freud both uncovers the productive mechanisms of the unconsciousness and simultaneously shies away from his discovery, fearing its consequences, by reducing the unconscious to the molar unities of “the father, the penis, the vagina, Castration with acapital C.” In the unconscious Freud finds a rich, varied subterranean multiplicity of the rhizome, but is determined to see it as arboreal: the one tree signifying Oedipus. And one can almost hear Herr Pankejeff sigh in frustration. As Deleuze and Guattari write,

That day, the Wolf-Man rose from the couch particularly tired. He knew that Freud had a genius for brushing up against the truth and passing it by, then filling the void with associations. He knew that Freud knew nothing about wolves … The only thing Freud understood was what a dog is, and a dog’s tail.

For Freud, there is no pack – there is not even a wolf. There is only the domesticated version of the wolf, a dog. Who is afraid of the big bad wolf? The question is wrong. Who is afraid of the big bad dog? Who is afraid of small dogs, domesticated dogs, pets?

As Brent Atkins argues in his reading of A Thousand Plateaus, the question is of aim: Freud has the one goal, normalcy. He attempts to bring back unity so that the ill patient can return to leading a normal life. And thus, in 1914, Freud declared the Sergei Pankejeff to be cured. But what if the goal is something else? Or rather, what if there are no goals, because only there lies creativity? For a forest can be a trap. Not seeing the wood for the trees – seeing too many trees more likely. Seeing only trees and missing the rhizomatic roots underneath.

When in his lecture “What is a creative act?” Deleuze warns us that the dreams other people dream can be dangerous, each dream a threat, he is referring to the tendency of psychoanalysis to constrict, to reduce things to a unity they do not possess. Everyone’s and anyone’s dream is both in danger of becoming restricted and unified, and becomes a danger in doing so. It is not the girl, poor, graceful Judy Garland and her dreams, that we should fear. She is not the other. Freud is the other. The other’s dream is the psychoanalytic dream, all tidied up, fix und fertig.

My dream, her dream, his dream – already too much identity, too much unity. It is not about confirming five or six or seven wolves, because, really, what a ridiculous question to ask. Who cares if it is six or seven wolves that eat you? The wolves are not distinct, countable entities grouped in a set. They are a multiplicity continuous and uncountable, an ever-changing population of wolves that nevertheless is always terrifying. But the real fear is of missing out. If we do not embrace multiplicity we will miss out on the real Pirate adventure that very simply is change. Let’s leave Sergei to his many wolves and his madness, let’s travel with him in a pack which has no fixed number. We are all wolves now, forget the sheep’s (dog’s) clothing. In the presence of madness the atmosphere shifts, and we confront “a pure multiplicity that changes elements, or becomes.”

 — Magdalena Wisniowska