The Wolfman part II - [excerpt]

translated by Asunción Alvarez

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MONEY
Put otherwise, the conceptual schema: 1) feces have a signification, they can have significations; 2) given that the subject has intestinal problems, the question is to know what their signification is—“I do not turn back to the patient’s childhood—to a time at which it was impossible that feces could have had the significance of money for him.” Thus Freud first reminds us that feces have a monetary signification. Then he tells us that the subject has intestinal problems and that, in order to know what their signification is, we must return to a previous time:

There are procedures that truly arise from conviction. They can even be of a rhetorical nature even to accredit first among the public an idea about a certain point, in order to benefit a more complex point. Freud appeals to something that everyone knows, namely feces=money, then he brings up the fact of the intestinal problems, and finally seeks the signification of these problems—which he says appeared very early on, before the feces had the signification of money.

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