Study Notes: Deleuze and Guattari’s “1914: One or Several Wolves?”

The Wolf-Man’s Dream: Multiplicity Against Oedipalization

Deleuze and Guattari begin their critique by examining Freud’s famous case study of the Wolf-Man, particularly his dream of wolves sitting in a tree. This dream becomes a battleground for conflicting interpretive methods. The dream’s content is relatively simple: the Wolf-Man sees six or seven white wolves sitting in a walnut tree outside his window. The intense fear associated with this image becomes, for Freud, the starting point of an elaborate interpretive procedure.

Freud, confronted with the multiplicity of wolves (the Wolf-Man drew five, mentioned six or seven), immediately seeks to reduce this multiplicity to unity through a series of interpretive maneuvers:

1. He connects the wolves to the fairy tale “The Wolf and the Seven Kid-Goats”
2. He progressively reduces the number of wolves through associations: “Seven wolves that are only kid-goats. Six wolves: the seventh goat (the Wolf-Man himself) is hiding in the clock. Five wolves: he may have seen his parents make love at five o’clock, and the roman numeral V is associated with the erotic spreading of a woman’s legs. Three wolves: the parents may have made love three times. Two wolves: the first coupling the child may have seen was the two parents more ferarum, or perhaps even two dogs. One wolf: the wolf is the father, as we all knew from the start. Zero wolves: he lost his tail, he is not just a castrater but also castrated.”
3. He ultimately arrives at the single wolf representing the father, and beyond that, to castration as the ultimate meaning

This reduction from many to one exemplifies what Deleuze and Guattari identify as psychoanalysis’s fundamental operation: the subordination of multiplicity to unity, difference to identity, and molecular phenomena to molar structures. As they sarcastically note: “Who is Freud trying to fool? The wolves never had a chance to get away and save their pack: it was already decided from the very beginning that animals could serve only to represent coitus between parents, or, conversely, be represented by coitus between parents.”

Their counter-reading insists on preserving the multiplicity of wolves as irreducible. The crucial insight is articulated through a child’s response when asked if she would like to be a wolf: “How stupid, you can’t be one wolf, you’re always eight or nine, six or seven. Not six or seven wolves all by yourself all at once, but one wolf among others, with five or six others.” The wolf exists primarily as pack, as multiplicity, and this multiplicity cannot be decomposed without fundamentally changing its nature.

This is not simply a dispute over the interpretation of a particular dream, but a challenge to psychoanalysis’s entire conceptual apparatus. The stake is an alternative conception of the unconscious: “Freud tried to approach crowd phenomena from the point of view of the unconscious, but he did not see clearly, he did not see that the unconscious itself was fundamentally a crowd. He was myopic and hard of hearing; he mistook crowds for a single person.”

The dream exemplifies what Deleuze and Guattari call “wolf-multiplicity”—a phenomenon that cannot be understood through the lens of psychoanalytic symbolism. The wolves are not symbols pointing beyond themselves to a hidden meaning (the primal scene, the father, castration); they are intensities that constitute the unconscious itself. The proper approach to this multiplicity is not interpretation but cartography—mapping the distributions, connections, and transformations that constitute the wolf-pack as an intensive phenomenon.

The Significance of Proper Names and Wolf-Multiplicities

Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to how the Wolf-Man “was in the process of acquiring a veritable proper name, the Wolf-Man, a name more properly his than his own, since it attained the highest degree of singularity in the instantaneous apprehension of a generic multiplicity: wolves.” This observation opens up a profound meditation on the nature of naming and identity.

The name “Wolf-Man” functions differently from ordinary proper names, which operate as “common nouns ensuring the unification of an aggregate they subsume.” Instead, it operates as what they call an “intensive” proper name—one that directly connects to the multiplicity it designates rather than subsuming it under a unity.

This distinction between intensive proper names and extensive common nouns is crucial for understanding how language can either capture multiplicities or reduce them. The intensive proper name “Wolf-Man” captures the very becoming-wolf that Freud’s analysis seeks to erase. Yet even this name is at risk of being “disfigured and misspelled, retranscribed as a patronymic”—that is, converted back into an extensive name that designates a unified subject.

Freud’s approach to language exemplifies this reductive tendency. When confronted with psychotic phenomena that manifest as pure multiplicities (like a skin experienced as “a multiplicity of pores, little spots, little scars or black holes”), Freud retreats to the unity of the word: “What has dictated the substitution is not the resemblance between the things denoted but the sameness of the words used to express them.”

This linguistic reduction parallels the interpretive reduction. Just as Freud reduces the multiplicity of wolves to the singularity of the father, he reduces the multiplicity of signifying elements to the unity of the signifier. This double reduction forms what Deleuze and Guattari identify as the “first stirrings of a subsequent adventure, that of the Signifier, the devious despotic agency that substitutes itself for asignifying proper names and replaces multiplicities with the dismal unity of an object declared lost.”

Intensive Multiplicities and Their Properties

Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two types of multiplicities, which forms a cornerstone of their ontological framework:

1. Extensive, molar multiplicities: Divisible, numerable, organized, hierarchical, and representable. These multiplicities operate through metrics and can be divided without changing in nature. They correspond to what Bergson called “numerical multiplicities” and what Deleuze and Guattari elsewhere term “arborescent multiplicities.”
2. Intensive, molecular multiplicities: Non-decomposable without changing in nature, defined by distances rather than metrics, and characterized by becomings rather than states. These correspond to Bergson’s “qualitative multiplicities” and what Deleuze and Guattari call “rhizomatic multiplicities.”

The key characteristics of intensive multiplicities include:

“Each element ceaselessly varies and alters its distance in relation to the others… These variable distances are not extensive quantities divisible by each other; rather, each is indivisible, or ‘relatively indivisible,’ in other words, they are not divisible below or above a certain threshold, they cannot increase or diminish without their elements changing in nature.”

This conception of intensive multiplicity has profound implications, fundamentally challenging Western metaphysics’ privileging of identity over difference, unity over multiplicity, and being over becoming. It suggests that relations between elements are primary, not the elements themselves. Elements are defined by their position within the multiplicity and by their distances from other elements – distances that are intensive rather than extensive, qualitative rather than quantitative.

The concept of threshold is crucial here. Unlike extensive quantities, which can be divided arbitrarily, intensive quantities have critical thresholds at which their nature changes. Temperature provides an example: water at 90°C and water at 100°C are not just quantitatively different; at the threshold of 100°C, a qualitative change occurs as water becomes vapor. Similarly, wolf-multiplicities have thresholds at which their nature transforms—thresholds of intensity, speed, and affect.

Deleuze and Guattari trace this concept through various formulations in mathematics and philosophy:

1. Riemann’s distinction between “discreet multiplicities and continuous multiplicities,” where “the metrical principle of the second kind of multiplicity resides solely in forces at work within them”
2. Russell and Meinong’s “distinction between multiplicities of magnitude or divisibility, which are extensive, and multiplicities of distance, which are closer to the intensive”
3. Bergson’s “distinction between numerical or extended multiplicities and qualitative or durational multiplicities”

Each of these formulations attempts to conceptualize multiplicity not as a numerical fragment of a lost unity but as a positive reality in its own right. Deleuze and Guattari’s innovation is to connect these mathematical and philosophical conceptions to a theory of desire, the unconscious, and becoming.

The practical application of this concept to psychoanalysis is direct: the Wolf-Man’s wolves constitute an intensive multiplicity that should be understood in terms of thresholds, intensities, and becomings rather than as symbols or representations. “The Wolf is the pack… an intensity, a band of intensity, a threshold of intensity on the Wolf-Man’s body without organs.”

The Unconscious as a Crowd: Against the Psychoanalytic Unconscious

One of the most radical aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s intervention is their reconceptualization of the unconscious. Against the Freudian unconscious—structured by repression, organized around lack, and centered on family drama—they propose an unconscious composed of multiplicities:

“Freud tried to approach crowd phenomena from the point of view of the unconscious, but he did not see clearly, he did not see that the unconscious itself was fundamentally a crowd. He was myopic and hard of hearing; he mistook crowds for a single person.”

This seemingly simple statement contains a profound challenge to psychoanalytic theory. The Freudian unconscious is fundamentally representational—it contains representations of repressed desires, traumatic events, and prohibited wishes. The unconscious as conceived by Deleuze and Guattari is non-representational—it consists not of hidden meanings but of intensities, flows, and connections.

They illustrate this conception through a series of schizophrenic experiences that manifest multiplicity directly:

1. “There are babies growing in my every pore”
2. “With me, it’s not in the pores, it’s in my veins, little iron rods growing in my veins”
3. “I don’t want them to give me any shots, except with camphorated alcohol. Otherwise breasts grow in my every pore.”

These experiences do not represent anything beyond themselves; they are direct expressions of the unconscious as a multiplicity. The mistake of psychoanalysis is to read these expressions as symbols or displacements of underlying unities (the mother, the father, castration). For Deleuze and Guattari, “Schizos, on the other hand, have sharp eyes and ears. They don’t mistake the buzz and shove of the crowd for daddy’s voice.”

This reconceptualization has profound implications for clinical practice. If the unconscious is a crowd rather than a theater, then the proper approach is not interpretation but experimentation—creating connections, mapping intensities, and facilitating becomings. The analyst’s role shifts from excavating hidden meanings to participating in the production of new possibilities.

Beyond clinical implications, this view of the unconscious transforms our understanding of subjectivity itself. The subject is no longer a unified entity with a hidden depth but a surface of inscription where multiplicities converge and transform. As they explain through the dream of the desert: “I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or foot. I know that the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would die if I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as certainly if I let go of the crowd.”

This “schizo position” on the periphery of the crowd exemplifies their alternative model of subjectivity—one that is neither fully integrated into social formations nor completely detached from them, but rather occupies the borderlines where transformations occur.

Pack vs. Mass: Two Types of Social Multiplicity

Building on Elias Canetti’s distinction, Deleuze and Guattari introduce a critical social dimension to their theory of multiplicity, distinguishing between:

1. Mass multiplicities: Characterized by “large quantity, divisibility and equality of the members, concentration, sociability of the aggregate as a whole, one-way hierarchy, organization of territoriality or territorialization, and emission of signs.”
2. Pack multiplicities: Characterized by “small or restricted numbers, dispersion, nondecomposable variable distances, qualitative metamorphoses, inequalities as remainders or crossings, impossibility of a fixed totalization or hierarchization, a Brownian variability in directions, lines of deterritorialization, and projection of particles.”

This distinction is not merely typological but has profound political implications. Pack multiplicities operate through what they call “lines of flight” – vectors of deterritorialization that escape organizational capture. Mass multiplicities, by contrast, function through segmentation and stratification, blocking or redirecting these lines of flight: “masses only integrate these lines in order to segment them, obstruct them, ascribe them a negative sign.”

The spatial organization of these multiplicities differs significantly:

“The leader of the pack or the band plays move by move, must wager everything every hand, whereas the group or mass leader consolidates or capitalizes on past gains.”

Similarly, the position of individuals within these multiplicities differs:

“In the changing constellation of the pack, in its dances and expeditions, he will again and again find himself at its edge. He may be in the center, and then, immediately afterwards, at the edge again; at the edge and then back in the center. When the pack forms a ring around the fire, each man will have neighbors to the right and left, but no one behind him; his back is naked and exposed to the wilderness.”

This peripheral position – “being on the periphery, holding on by a hand or a foot” – is what Deleuze and Guattari identify as the schizo position, contrasted with the “paranoid position of the mass subject, with all the identifications of the individual with the group, the group with the leader, and the leader with the group; be securely embedded in the mass, get close to the center, never be at the edge except in the line of duty.”

Crucially, Deleuze and Guattari reject any simple dualism between these types, warning against “establishing a dualist opposition between the two types of multiplicities, molecular machines and molar machines; that would be no better than the dualism between the One and the multiple.” Instead, they propose a complex interrelation: “There are only multiplicities of multiplicities forming a single assemblage, operating in the same assemblage: packs in masses and masses in packs.”

This interrelation manifests in concrete social formations. Even seemingly hierarchical structures like “high-society life” can function as packs rather than masses: “High-society relations are never coextensive with social relations, they do not coincide.” Similarly, revolutionary movements can begin as packs but transform into masses, or vice versa. The dynamic between these forms constitutes a central axis of social and political analysis.

The Body without Organs and Intensive Distribution

The notion of the Body without Organs (BwO) constitutes a radical rethinking of bodily organization and subjectivity. Against the organized body of psychoanalysis – structured by zones, stages, and functional differentiations – Deleuze and Guattari propose the BwO as a surface of intensity.

The BwO is not empty but full – populated by multiplicities that traverse it according to thresholds, gradients, and transitions: “A body without organs is not an empty body stripped of organs, but a body upon which that which serves as organs (wolves, wolf eyes, wolf jaws?) is distributed according to crowd phenomena, in Brownian motion, in the form of molecular multiplicities.”

This concept has profound implications for understanding desire, which is no longer conceived as lack (as in psychoanalysis) but as production. The BwO is “a body populated by multiplicities,” a field of immanence where desires are produced as positive processes rather than representations of absent objects.

The Wolf-Man’s dream provides a concrete example: the denuded tree upon which the wolves are perched functions as a BwO. Similarly, the skin with its pores and scars constitutes another BwO where intensities circulate: “On the Wolf-Man’s nose, the elements, determined as pores in the skin, little scars in the pores, little ruts in the scar tissue, ceaselessly dance, grow, and diminish.” These are not metaphors or symbols but real distributions of intensity that constitute the unconscious as a productive machinery.

The BwO challenges the psychoanalytic understanding of both the body and psychic organization. Where psychoanalysis sees organs primarily as representatives of psychic fantasies, Deleuze and Guattari see them as points of intensity distributed on the BwO:

“The jaw descends to the anus. Hold onto those wolves by your jaw and your anus. The jaw is not a wolf jaw, it’s not that simple; jaw and wolf form a multiplicity that is transformed into eye and wolf, anus and wolf, as a function of other distances, at other speeds, with other multiplicities, between thresholds.”

This approach fundamentally challenges psychoanalytic concepts like castration, which relies on a logic of lack and absence. For Deleuze and Guattari, “A hole is no more negative than a wolf. Castration, lack, substitution: a tale told by an overconscious idiot who has no understanding of multiplicities as formations of the unconscious. A wolf is a hole, they are both particles of the unconscious, nothing but particles, productions of particles, particulate paths, as elements of molecular multiplicities.”

The BwO provides an alternative to the Oedipal organization of desire. Rather than channeling desire through the triangular structure of Oedipus (mother-father-child), the BwO allows desire to distribute itself according to its own logic, creating connections and intensities that escape familial representation. This makes it a concept with profound political implications, as it challenges not just psychoanalytic theory but the entire social organization of desire in capitalist society.

Neurosis vs. Psychosis: Multiplicities and Clinical Categories

Deleuze and Guattari begin their essay by referring to Freud’s 1915 article on “The Unconscious,” which distinguishes between neurosis and psychosis based on how each relates to multiplicity:

“Freud says that hysterics or obsessives are people capable of making a global comparison between a sock and a vagina, a scar and castration, etc. Doubtless, it is at one and the same time that they apprehend the object globally and perceive it as lost. Yet it would never occur to a neurotic to grasp the skin erotically as a multiplicity of pores, little spots, little scars or black holes, or to grasp the sock erotically as a multiplicity of stitches.”

The psychotic, by contrast, relates directly to multiplicities: “we should expect the multiplicity of these little cavities to prevent him from using them as substitutes for the female genital.” This distinction reveals a fundamental difference in how neurotics and psychotics organize their experience. The neurotic maintains global unities, even in substitution and displacement, while the psychotic experiences multiplicities directly: “when he starts comparing goosebumps to a field of tiny rhinoceros horns, we get the feeling that the atmosphere has changed and that we are now in the presence of madness.”

For Deleuze and Guattari, this clinical distinction has philosophical implications. The neurotic remains within what they call “molar” organizations—structures that maintain identity and unity. The psychotic accesses “molecular” multiplicities directly—experiencing intensities without subordinating them to unified representations. Far from seeing psychosis as merely pathological, they suggest it provides access to dimensions of reality that neurotic organization obscures.

This reconceptualization of clinical categories challenges psychoanalytic practice at its foundation. If the psychotic’s relation to multiplicity is not a deficit but a different mode of organization, then the goal of treatment cannot be to restore unity but rather to develop what they call a “molecular politics” that allows these multiplicities to become viable, connected, and productive.

This view transforms the Wolf-Man’s second “psychotic episode,” where he “kept constant watch over the variations or changing path of the little holes or scars on the skin of his nose.” Rather than seeing this as regression or fragmentation, Deleuze and Guattari approach it as a legitimate engagement with intensive multiplicity—one that psychoanalysis systematically misunderstands.

Critique of Psychoanalytic Reductionism

Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis centers on its reductive procedures, which they identify in two primary forms in Freud’s work:

1. Verbal subsumption: Freud’s treatment of psychosis, where multiplicity in things is compensated by unity in words: “When there is no unity in the thing, there is at least unity and identity in the word.”
2. Free association: Freud’s treatment of neurosis, where free association is guided to converge on predetermined unities (the Father, castration).

Both procedures aim at the same result: “bringing back the unity or identity of the person or allegedly lost object.” This desire for unity reflects what Deleuze and Guattari see as psychoanalysis’s alignment with repressive social forces.

The essay offers a detailed account of Freud’s approach to the Wolf-Man’s dream, showing how his interpretive procedure systematically dismantles the multiplicity of wolves:

“We witness Freud’s reductive glee; we literally see multiplicity leave the wolves to take the shape of goats that have absolutely nothing to do with the story. Seven wolves that are only kid-goats. Six wolves: the seventh goat (the Wolf-Man himself) is hiding in the clock. Five wolves: he may have seen his parents make love at five o’clock… Three wolves: the parents may have made love three times. Two wolves: the first coupling the child may have seen was the two parents more ferarum… One wolf: the wolf is the father, as we all knew from the start. Zero wolves: he lost his tail…”

This reductive procedure, they argue, is not incidental to psychoanalysis but constitutes its fundamental operation – the transformation of real multiplicities into imaginary unities. It reflects psychoanalysis’s alignment with what they call “arborescent” thought – hierarchical structures that subordinate multiplicity to unity, becoming to being, and difference to identity.

The case of the Wolf-Man reveals how psychoanalysis functions as a “despotic machine” that captures and redirects libidinal flows. When confronted with the Wolf-Man’s fascination with wolves, Freud can only interpret it through the lens of the Oedipal drama, missing entirely what Deleuze and Guattari call “the fascination exerted by wolves and the meaning of their silent call, the call to become-wolf.”

This critique extends beyond Freud to the entire psychoanalytic tradition. They note that the Wolf-Man’s treatment continued “for all eternity under Brunswick, Lacan, Leclaire,” suggesting that post-Freudian developments, despite their theoretical innovations, maintain the same fundamental structure of reduction and unification.

Becoming-Animal and the Politics of Transformation

The concept of “becoming-animal” (specifically becoming-wolf in this essay) represents one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most significant theoretical innovations. Becoming-animal is not metaphorical, imitative, or symbolic; it is a real process that produces a “zone of proximity” between human and animal.

“The wolf, as the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity in a given region, is not a representative, a substitute, but an I feel. I feel myself becoming a wolf, one wolf among others, on the edge of the pack.”

This process challenges both the identificatory logic of psychoanalysis and the representational logic of language. It is not about belief or representation (“don’t think for a minute that it has to do with believing oneself a wolf, representing oneself as a wolf”) but about real transformations in the distribution of intensities, speeds, and affects.

Becoming-animal involves what Deleuze and Guattari call “deterritorialization” – the process by which fixed relations are destabilized and new connections made possible. “To become wolf or to become hole is to deterritorialize oneself following distinct but entangled lines.”

This process has nothing to do with imitation or representation. It is not about “acting like” a wolf or “symbolizing” a wolf, but about entering into composition with wolf-particles, wolf-affects, wolf-speeds. The crucial point is that becoming-wolf involves a transformation at the molecular level—a reconfiguration of intensities and relations that changes what a body can do.

The political dimension of becoming-animal emerges in its opposition to stable identities and hierarchical organizations. Becoming-animal produces what they call “lines of flight” – vectors of transformation that escape the capturing mechanisms of social machines. These lines of flight are essential for any genuine transformation, as they allow experimentation with new modes of existence beyond established categories and identities.

Significantly, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish their concept of becoming from evolutionary or developmental models: “Why assume (as does Konrad Lorenz, for example) that bands and their type of companionship represent a more rudimentary evolutionary state than group societies or societies of conjugality?” The pack is not a primitive form of social organization but an alternative logic of multiplicity that persists alongside and within mass formations.

Philosophical Genealogy: Rhizome vs. Tree

Deleuze and Guattari situate their theory of multiplicity within a broader philosophical genealogy, tracing different conceptions of multiplicity through mathematics and philosophy:

1. Riemann’s distinction between “discrete multiplicities and continuous multiplicities”
2. Meinong and Russell’s distinction between “multiplicities of magnitude” and “multiplicities of distance”
3. Bergson’s distinction between “numerical multiplicities” and “qualitative multiplicities”

These distinctions evolve in their work into the contrast between “arborescent multiplicities and rhizomatic multiplicities,” which becomes a fundamental conceptual opposition throughout “A Thousand Plateaus.”

The arborescent or tree-like model of thought (which they associate with traditional Western philosophy, linguistics, and psychoanalysis) organizes reality hierarchically, with each element defined by its position within a centralized structure. The rhizomatic model (which they associate with nomadic thought) operates through horizontal connections, with no central organizing principle or privileged point of entry.

This distinction is not merely descriptive but normative: Deleuze and Guattari actively advocate for rhizomatic thinking as a way to escape the limitations of Western metaphysics and its political correlates. However, they also warn against a simplistic opposition: “There is no question, however, of establishing a dualist opposition between the two types of multiplicities… That would be no better than the dualism between the One and the multiple.”

Instead, they propose a more complex relationship: “Trees have rhizome lines, and the rhizome points of arborescence.” This intermingling of different logics of multiplicity prevents their theory from hardening into a new binary opposition while still maintaining its critical force.

The concepts of tree and rhizome provide a way to understand different forms of social and political organization. Tree-like structures organize through hierarchy, centralization, and binary oppositions. Rhizomatic structures operate through alliance, connection, and heterogeneity. The state, the family, and psychoanalysis exemplify arborescent organizations, while nomadic bands, certain artistic movements, and schizophrenic experience manifest rhizomatic tendencies.

This opposition between tree and rhizome is not merely abstract but has concrete political implications. Tree-like structures tend to reproduce existing power relations and identities, while rhizomatic ones open possibilities for transformation and becoming. The political project implicit in “A Thousand Plateaus” involves fostering rhizomatic connections against arborescent capture—creating what they call “war machines” that resist state appropriation.