284 Derrida 1963–1983
were not merely theoretical. Towards the end of the 1960s, it
was Abraham and Torok who convinced Marguerite Derrida to
undertake a training analysis; they also recommended to her Joyce
McDougall, an analyst greatly infl uenced by Donald Winnicott
and Melanie Klein.^47 The admission of Marguerite to the Société
Psychanalytique de Paris was far from straightforward. In 1974,
she was initially ‘referred’, to the great surprise of René Diatkine,
one of those who had been supervising her. At a meeting, one of the
training analysts apparently remarked to him: ‘You really need to
realize that if you accept Mme Derrida, you’ll be opening the door
to Jacques Derrida.’ Marguerite was accepted the following year,
and opened a practice in the rue des Feuillantines, but she tried to
keep as far away as possible from the institutional struggles that
were tearing the psychoanalytical milieu apart.^48
For Derrida, writing ‘Fors’, the long preface to The Wolf Man’s
Magic Word, was a ‘perilous exercise for all sorts of reasons’,
overshadowed as it was by the death of Nicolas Abraham one year
previously.^49 But the book fascinated him and he wanted to try to
make the work of those two marginal fi gures in psychoanalysis
better known. Abraham and Torok had focused on the memoirs
of the Wolf Man, one of Freud’s most famous patients, and put
forward in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word a new reading of this case
which had attracted numerous commentaries, including those of
Lacan and of Deleuze and Guattari. Rereading with a fresh eye
the remarks and dream narratives of the Wolf Man (whose real
name was Sergei Pankejeff ), they brought out the interplay between
the four languages that played a crucial role in his personal story:
Russian, German, English, and French. Abraham and Torok also
introduced a series of new concepts, such as ‘the rind of the ego’ and
the ‘crypt’, a sort of ‘false unconscious fi lled with phantoms – to wit,
fossilized words, live corpses, and foreign bodies’.^50
Published in October 1976, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word was a
great success, especially among the Lacanians – which greatly irri-
tated Lacan himself. On 11 January 1977, he attacked the work at
length in his seminar, settling several accounts at the same time. The
fi rst concerned philosophy – in general but mainly in particular:
I’ve got a thing here which, I have to say, has fi lled me with
terror. It’s a series that’s come out with the title ‘La philo sophie
en eff et’. Philosophy in eff ect, in eff ects of signifi ers, that’s
exactly what I’m doing my best to pull out of, I mean I don’t
think I’m doing philosophy, you always do more philosophy
than you think, there’s nothing more slippery than this area;
you do it, too, when it suits you, and it’s certainly not what you
can feel proudest of.^51