Freud's Beasty Boys
Sex, Violence and Masculinity

Oxana Timofeeva (Author)

9781509568406, Polity Press

Hardback, published 31 January 2025

128 pages
21.8 x 14.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.272 kg

"Timofeeva’s Freud’s Beasty Boys is much more than an outstanding exploration of Freud’s three classic cases where the patient displays an excessive attachment to some animal, an exploration which focuses on the paradoxes of retroactive temporality. The animal in question is not just a metaphor, a projection of the patient’s repressed traumas: Timofeeva takes the link seriously and literally, analyzing the animality that inhabits the core of human subjectivity."
Slavoj Žižek

This book examines violence and sexuality after Freud. Its characters, though, are not women and men, but rather animals and children. Focusing on three famous Freudian cases in which little boys had issues with animals – Little Hans, The Rat Man, and the Wolf Man – it revises the role played by animals in male gender socialization.

Timofeeva demonstrates the relevance of psychoanalysis for anyone who wants to understand how patriarchy works, but she also points to its limitations. For Freud, sexuality creates the background of our psychic lives, and unconscious sexual fantasies are the origins of psychic disorders such as hysteria, obsessions and phobias. But what are the origins of sexual fantasies? 

Timofeeva argues that behind psychic dramas of sexuality there is something else: a mechanism of violence which she calls ‘the machine of masculinity’ and which she analyses both through Freud’s cases and through the lens of religion, anthropology and her own life experiences. Wolves, rats and horses are magical agents that connect us to the world of the dead – that is, to the history of our culture in which monotheism replaced totemic practices but the basic psychosocial matrix of turning love into violence continues to reproduce itself.

Introduction

The Theatre of the Soul
A Horse Is Being Beaten
A Rathole
The Number of Beasts

Notes
Bibliography

Subject Areas: Sociology & anthropology [JH]