the ratman experiment

Psych Reviews

Psychology, Meditation, and Philosophy book reviews

Case Studies: The ‘Ratman’ – Sigmund Freud

From unconscious to conscious.

When Sigmund Freud began working with the young educated man featured in this review, he didn’t realize the strange paths his treatment would follow. His patient complained about long standing compulsive ideas that were getting worse. “The main content of his suffering is his fear that something will befall two people whom he greatly loves, his father and a lady whom he admires. In addition he experiences  compulsive urges, for example to cut his throat with a razor, and imposes  prohibitions on himself relating to matters of indifference.” At this point in Freud’s career he was becoming well known as a sex expert, and patients were beginning to seek him out, hoping that sexual insights from childhood and adolescence would reveal more about their neurosis.

At this early stage in Freud’s career, his treatment style was still developing. What was written in his paper Some Remarks on a Case of Obsessive-compulsive Neurosis , betrays Freud’s self-promotion more by what he left out rather than what he left in. This was what later analysts had to avoid in order to update psychoanalysis to their fresh clinical observations. A great tool to help readers of Freud’s “Ratman” study is the well researched Freud and the Rat Man by Patrick J. Mahony. Patrick was able to compare the original process notes with the published case, make improved translations, and correct some of the chronology. He also studied the life histories of the influential people in the subject’s life to piece out missed opportunities that Freud wasn’t able to explore. Psychoanalysis is a long process, and Freud was unfortunately not able to produce published case studies that were long enough to affect a full cure, despite his claims of achieving cures. Part of the difficulty was the need to be discreet to hide the patient’s identity. In a letter to Carl Jung, Freud told him that he wanted to publish his case on the “Ratman” that he discussed in meetings at the International Psychoanalytic Congress in the Hotel Bristol in Salzburg. “I suddenly feel like writing up the Salzburg Rat Man…It will not be long because in print I shall have to be much more discreet than in a lecture.” Jung was supportive of Freud in publishing the story, and enthusiastic about the presentation Freud gave at the Congress.

Some of the misgivings that Freud had were not entirely out of modesty. His oral report to the Congress was a success, but much was removed in print. In Freud and the culture of psychoanalysis  by Steven Marcus, Freud’s paper is described both as “one of the richest, most complex and opaque pieces”, but lacking in “the coherence, expository fullness, narrative virtuosity, and sustained sinuosity of episodic, incremental development.” The importance of understanding as much of this case study as possible is due to the notion of “cure” in psychoanalysis. The more unconscious intentions are made conscious to the patient, the more understanding there is, and the more the patient understands how counter-productive their thinking patterns are, the more they are motivated to cease them. For example, the inhibitions due to superstitious beliefs and omnipotent rituals to control reality, that this patient believed in, were draining his energy and misdirecting it away from his needed work. A true cure would be to get any patient to think more scientifically and act more assertively about their projects. Since this applies to everyone, a more comprehensive cure would have to also analyze how bias and prejudice from the analyst would interfere with a deeper cure. Seeing how defenses can transfer from past targets onto new targets is a transference insight that can help patients see their neurosis in action, but Freud was only beginning to see how his own transference was limiting his case studies. He readily admitted to preferring to develop theories rather than actively treating patients.

“…I get tired of people…I am  not basically interested in therapy, and I usually find that I am engaged – in any particular case – with the theoretical problems with which I happen to be interested at the time.” Raymond de Saussure added that “Freud was not a good psychoanalytic clinician. Since he had not been analyzed himself, he tended to commit two kinds of errors. First, he had practiced suggestion too long not to have been materially affected by it. When he was persuaded of the truth of something, he had considerable difficulty in waiting until this verity became clear to his patient. Freud wanted to convince him immediately. Because of that, he talked too much. Second, one rapidly sensed what special theoretical question preoccupied him, for often during the analytic hour he developed at length new points of view he was clarifying in his own mind. This was a gain for the discipline, but not always for the patient’s treatment.”

Countertransference

One of the insights of the “Ratman” case is seeing how perception can find similarities in people and environments that trigger painful complexes. The associations that the patient makes gives clues to the sore spot in the mind hiding in the unconscious. This is a universal aspect to anyone sensitive enough to feel bad about themselves. Gradually as the sore-spot is exposed, many associations are revealed. They include inhibitions, envy, desire and useless rituals that drain energy. What can limit an analyst’s ability to catch these insights is their own lack of understanding. One of the big ones is a lack of understanding of the opposite sex. Like a male patient going to a female psychologist without the proper experience, or in the case of Freud, his lack of understanding of female psychology, limited his ability to discover insights based on female influences on his patients. “…I am also too patriarchal to be a good analyst.” Thankfully Mahony brings that back in with his research of Freud’s patient Ernst Lanzer, the Austrian Lawyer. Theories about Ernst’s interactions with his mother and sisters are introduced to provide a wider picture of his neurosis. Freud himself, according to Mahony, self-described as an “obsessional type” which would condition his interest, and sympathy with patients like him. The problem of a positive transference is that there will be too much regard which can prevent increasing depth in the case study.

The ‘Ratman’

Ernst Lanzer’s recounting of his life history to Freud began with significant encounters with females at an early age, but also included his ambivalence over whether to marry the love of his life, Gisela Adler, not related to the psychotherapist Alfred Adler. Gisela being from a family that his mother did not approve of, and would eventually become infertile, created a lot of ambivalence in his choice. Freud said that Ernst “…gives the impression of being clear-headed and perceptive. When I ask what causes him to put particular emphasis on information about his sexual life he replies that that is what he knows about my theories. Apart from this he has read nothing of what I have written, but when leafing through one of my books he recently came across an explanation of bizarre associations of words that reminded him so much of his own ‘mental efforts’ with regard to his own ideas that he resolved to entrust himself to me for treatment.”

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtl55-the-psychopathology-of-everyday-life-sigmund-freud.html

Like a lot of Freud’s patients, they tried different therapies to no avail. “None of the cures he has attempted have done him any good except for one course of hydropathic treatment in a clinic…but this was no doubt only because he struck up an acquaintance there that led to regular sexual intercourse. He has no such opportunities here and has intercourse rarely and at irregular intervals. Prostitutes are repugnant to him. His sex life has been altogether wretched, and masturbation has played only a minor role, when he was 16 or 17. His potency is normal, he claims; he first had intercourse at the age of 26.” To get behind the repression Freud warned the patient that the treatment required that he would have to let go of tough resistances and “tell everything that came into his mind, even if he found this unpleasant , and even if the thoughts seemed  unimportant, irrelevant  or  nonsensical… “

Early sexual life

Mahony traces Lanzer’s sexual trajectory that moved from physical contact to only watching. “Overall, the sensuality of Ernst’s childhood considerably diminished through puberty, and limited tactile eroticism gave way to voyeurism as the main source of sexual pleasure.” Freud recounts Lanzer’s monologue: “My sexual life began very early. I remember a scene that took place when I was 3 or 4 years old, which came into my mind quite clearly years later. We had a pretty young governess called Fräulein [Rudolf]. One evening she was lying on the sofa reading, quite scantily dressed; I was lying next to her and asked for permission to crawl under her petticoats. She said I could, provided that I did not tell anyone. She was not wearing much, and I touched her genitals and her belly, which I found rather odd. Since then I have felt a burning, tormenting curiosity to see the female body. I can still remember with what feeling of suspense I waited at the Baths, where I was still allowed to go with my sisters and governess, for our governess to take off her clothes and enter the water. From the age of 5 I can remember more. We had another governess then, also young and pretty, who had abscesses on her bottom which she used to squeeze every evening. I would wait furtively for that moment to ease my curiosity. The same was true at the Baths, although Fräulein [Paula] was more reserved than the other one. (In answer to my interpolated question he replied: ‘I did not sleep regularly in her bedroom, but mostly with my parents.’) I remember a scene that took place when I must have been about 7 years old. We were all sitting together one evening, the governess, the cook, another girl, my brother who was 18 months younger, and myself. I suddenly caught a snatch of the girls’ conversation and heard Fräulein Paula say: “You could do that with the little one, but [he] is too clumsy, he would be bound to get it wrong.” I did not understand very clearly what was meant, but did understand that the remark was a disparaging one, and began to cry. Paula comforted me and told me that a girl who had done something similar with a little lad in her care had been locked up for several months. I do not think she got up to any mischief with me, but I was allowed to take all sorts of liberties with her. When I came into her bedroom I would pull the covers off her and touch her and she would never try to stop me. She was not very intelligent and obviously very needy sexually.”

The beginning of obsession

Sensitive at perceived slights, he recalled another slight from an older friend. “…he had taken a great fancy to him and done wonders for his self-esteem, so that he had thought himself almost a genius. This student later became his private tutor and changed his attitude towards him quite suddenly, treating him like the worst kind of fool. Finally he realized that the man was in fact interested in one of his sisters and had only taken up with him in order to gain an entrée into the house.” Freud’s patient was feeling what many people have felt, a feeling of being used, but his mind turned into a direction that was much more pathological. “At the age of 6 I was already troubled by erections and I know that I once went to my mother to complain to her about this. I remember too that I had to overcome certain scruples in order to do so, for I already sensed that there was some connection with my fantasies and my curiosity and for some time back then harboured a morbid notion that my parents knew what I was thinking, which I explained to myself by saying that I had articulated my thoughts without hearing them myself. I see this as the beginning of my illness. There were people, girls, that I liked the look of and whom I had an urgent wish  to see naked.  These desires were accompanied, however, by  an uncanny feeling that something would happen if I allowed myself such thoughts and that I had to do all sorts of things to prevent this.”

When asked what he thought would happen, “ my father would die… From an early age I was preoccupied by thoughts of my father’s death; this made me melancholy for a long time.’ On this occasion I learn with astonishment that the father, who, even today, is the object of his compulsive fears, has been dead for several years.” Freud saw firstly that his patient’s desire to see females naked triggered embarrassment and a fear of something bad that might happen. “If I harbour the wish to see a woman naked, my father must die.” The conflict is early on in his life, but Freud hints at the mechanism of the “I” and how it can gradually develop repressive power towards wishes and impulses. “…If it does not yet have its compulsive character this is because the ‘I’ ( Ich ) has not yet set itself up in complete contradiction to it, [and] does not yet sense it to be something alien.” The fear begins to motivate a superstitious need to avert disaster that Freud calls “defensive measures” or “parrying actions.”

Rat torture

Freud wrestled with the vague “I articulated my thoughts without hearing them” as a projection to the outside world that people can know his thoughts better than he knows himself. To Freud it was like he had an unconscious perception of what was repressed but it could not become clear, other than it vaguely involved his father. Eventually Freud’s patient opened up about his increasing intensity of his compulsions. When doing military exercises, which helped him to calm compulsive ideas, he wanted to prove his worth to career officers in his outfit. In a halt during a march he lost his pince-nez glasses, and carried on without them. “During this same halt I sat down between two officers, one of whom, a captain with a Czech name, was to become a significant figure for me. I felt a certain fear of this man, for he obviously took pleasure in cruelty . I am not saying that he was a bad man, but in the officers’ mess he had spoken repeatedly in favour of introducing whipping as a punishment, so that I had been obliged to oppose him quite forcefully. Now, during the halt we got into conversation and the captain told me that he had read about a particularly terrible form of punishment practised in the Orient…'” He broke off from the unpleasant details, but with Freud’s insistence he explained that “the condemned man was tied up…with an upturned pot over his behind, into which rats were then put, which once again [Lanzer] stood up, showing every sign of horror and resistance – bored their way in. Into the anus, I added, helping him out.” Freud provided suggestions a lot more than therapists are willing to do to day, but this was the beginning of Psychoanalysis. The patient, displayed a mixed facial expression to Freud that signaled “… horror at the pleasure he does not even know he feels .”

The ‘Ratman’ continued that an “ idea flashed through my mind that  this might happen to someone who was dear to me.”  Freud guessed at this point that it was the lady that he admires “to whom this ‘idea’ applies.” Freud targeted the idea and it’s possible associations. The idea represents a wish and a fear. “At the very same moment as the idea, the ‘sanction’ also appears, i.e., the parrying measure that must be adopted to prevent such a fantasy from being realized.” Here the word “guess” is translated differently by Mahony. He had access to Freud’s notes and was able to find translation problems. Here the guess should be translated from the German erraten  meaning a correct guess. The Father being the earlier idea than the lady, Freud guesses that the father is included in this torture. “…the rat punishment should be carried out on the lady. Now he is forced to admit that at the same time there surfaced another idea, that the punishment should also be applied to his father.” This also brings up the theory that Lanzer wants to punish objects of desire for not being supportive of his goals for them, but he suppresses them when in presence of those people. “He admitted, incidentally, that from time to time he experiences quite explicit impulses to do some harm to the lady he adores. These impulses are generally subdued in her presence and come to the fore only in her absence.”

Obsessive rituals

Lanzer’s obsession escalated when his replacement pince-nez glasses were delivered to him by the sadistic Captain with the message that a Lieutenant A. paid for the charges and that he should be paid back. The demand from the torture loving captain triggered his wish to pay the money back and to not pay the money back. “ You must not pay back the money, or it will happen (i.e. the rat fantasy would be realized on his father and the lady). And straight away, in accordance with a familiar pattern, there arose a command to combat this sanction, as a vow: ‘ You must pay back the 3.80 crowns to Lieutenant A.’,  words that he found himself speaking half out loud…Two days later the military exercises came to an end. He filled up the intervening time with efforts to pay back the small sum of money to Lieutenant A. …At first he attempted to make the payment through another officer who was going to the post but was [not] very pleased when this man brought the money back and explained that he had not bumped into Lieutenant A. at the post office, as this manner of keeping his vow did not satisfy him since it did not meet the form of words: ‘You must pay back the money to Lieutenant A.’ Finally he met the man A. who refused to take the money, however, remarking that he had not paid anything on his behalf, and did not deal with the post at all, it was Lieutenant B. who did so. It caused him some consternation to realize that he could not keep his vow because it was based on a false premiss and he dreamed up the most bizarre solutions to his problem: he would go to the post office with both A. and B., where A. would give 3.80 crowns to the girl who dealt with the post and the girl would give his money back to B. so that he could pay A. back the 3.80 crowns according to the strict wording of his vow.” Even after all that, the exasperated Freud was able to learn that Lanzer already knew who paid for the delivery charges. It was the post-office woman herself. She met with an officer and asked about Lanzer. She told him that she would pay for the charges herself so he could get his glasses sooner. The officer overheard Lanzer’s name and told him what happened. When the sadistic captain gave him the wrong instructions, Lanzer knew they were wrong, but his compulsions sowed doubt and he followed his pathological vows anyways.

When obsessive rituals take hold they are emotionally invested and must be carried out to gain relief. Ambivalence is increased when opposite choices are available and worries of punishment lie on both sides. If Lanzer pays the money he worries that rat torture will happen to Gisela and his Father. If he doesn’t repay the money then he’ll be guilty of bad character. Ernst remembered a war story from his father where he had gambling debts to repay but it never happened because he couldn’t find the person he owed. Ernst identified with his father and associated repayment with being better than his father was. All these worries clouded the simple answer of just going to the post office lady and paying her directly. It’s hard to imagine a pathology like this when you are just a reader. One has to imagine vividly so that the emotions well up partially inside oneself to feel the bind an obsessive person is in. Their emotions override facts and carry them away. The way that people stayed in Lanzer’s mind, including his father that had already passed away, was as imaginary figures watching over him. Intrusive thoughts. Those figures influenced him emotionally and he communicated with them. “…For a long time he could not take in the fact of this father’s death; again and again it came about that when he heard a good joke he would say to himself: ‘I must tell my father that.’ His imagination played on the idea of his father, moreover, so that when there was a knock at the door he would often think: ‘That will be my father’, and would expect to see his father when he walked into a room; and although he was never able to forget the fact that he was dead, the expectation that his ghost would appear held no terror but was something for which he felt a deep longing.”

Displacement and repression

Here Freud shows how badly linked complexes behave. It means with distorted logic, or displacement, distorted emotions follow. “The idea-content that we know about has arrived here by means of inaccurate linking. We are not used to sensing strong emotions in ourselves without idea-content, and so in the absence of a content we take a different one, which seems more or less to fit, as a surrogate, much as our police, if they cannot catch the real murderer, will arrest the wrong person in his place. The fact that inaccurate links are made also accounts in itself for the impotence of logic in combating the tormenting idea.” Part of the healing process is to investigate the distorted logic to find out what underlies them. Freud goes onto use an archaeological metaphor of Pompeii for unearthing what is unconscious. Lanzer was worried that “one person might behave in such a way as to overcome the [self-blame], but another might not,” which Freud replied that “it is in the nature of things that the emotion is always overcome, usually while the work is still in progress.” This gave him hope that he could reintegrate his personality and achieve more in his life. Paralleling Carl Jung’s understanding of one-sidedness in people, and the need to develop skills to channel unconscious undeveloped impulses in a good direction, Freud suggested that “all that he need do is weld his new opposition, between the moral person and the wicked one, together with the one we had discussed earlier, the opposition between the conscious and the unconscious. The moral person was the conscious part, the wicked one the unconscious part. – He can remember that, although he regards himself as a moral person, he certainly did things in his childhood that had come from the other person. – I observe that he has discovered, incidentally as it were, one of the main characteristics of the unconscious, namely its relationship to the  infantile.  The unconscious is the infantile part, that bit of the personality that cut itself off back in infancy, did not continue to develop alongside the rest of the personality and was thus  repressed.”

“You interfered with my pleasure!”

In a Freudian sense, neurosis comes from having frustrated goals or wishes. The unconscious mind can roil in short-term destructive goals that scare the conscious mind which represses it. When people see frustrated goals, the lack of skill in dealing with problems shows itself in vengeful thoughts and actions that hurt oneself and society. One can see this acted out in soap operas and pulpy dramas. Impulses without the accompanying skill lead to these kind of dramas in the mind. Lanzer recounted a childhood story that had that unskilled reaction when he was slighted by a girl who was not as affectionate towards him as he wanted her to be. The desire to want to change people is a form of self-created stress. To try and change her mind he imagined that “…the death of his father…as one such possibility” as a way to garner sympathy from her. He had a similar thought towards the Gisela. “He was already in love with the lady he had mentioned, but was prevented by material considerations from contemplating a closer connection. Then the idea came: his father’s death would perhaps make him rich enough to be able to marry her. ” With a clarity, Freud reminded Lanzer of the constant self-imposed obstacles he would create for himself if he continued to find pleasure in the wrong solutions. “I remark that it is well known that those who are ill derive a certain satisfaction from their suffering, so that they all in fact strive only partially to get well. He must not lose sight of the fact that a treatment of the kind we were undertaking would inevitably be accompanied by constant resistance ; I should be reminding him of this fact over and over again.” Fortunately the psychoanalytical process takes advantage of the repeated resistance. “One arrives at such a solution…by examining when an individual compulsive idea first appeared and under what external circumstances it tends to be repeated.” In this case, the desire to annihilate obstacles to wishes, scares the patient by showing him what violence he is capable of dreaming up. For a lot of people in analysis, it can be a recording of a list of grudges and desires for revenge against those who interfered with their pleasure.

“Here the connection between this compulsive idea and our patient’s life is contained in the opening remarks of the account. His lady was absent while he was studying strenuously for an examination that would make union with her a more realistic possibility. While studying he was overtaken by longing for his absent love and the thought of the reason for her absence. And then there came something that in a normal person might have been a stirring of ill-feeling towards the grandmother: ‘Did the old woman really have to fall ill now, when I feel such dreadful yearning for  her? ‘ We must suppose something similar but far more intense to have taken place in our patient, an unconscious attack of rage that, together with his yearning, might have been couched in the exclamation: ‘Oh, I should like to go there and kill the old woman who is keeping my beloved from me!’ There follows the command: ‘Kill yourself as a punishment for such murderous, angry cravings’ and, accompanied by such vehement emotion, the whole process enters the consciousness of our compulsive patient  in reverse order – the punitive command at the beginning, the reference to the punishable cravings at the end.”

Compulsion to understand

Like with Hysteria, Freud isn’t just talking about Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, but a conglomeration of symptoms under the heading of obsession. This obsession was like that of a stalker that must always know the whereabouts of the target and everything the target says is interpreted with this lens of control and suspicion. “Before the summer, when he took his leave of her in Vienna, he interpreted something she said as meaning that she did not wish to be associated with him in present company, and this made him very unhappy. In the summer they found the opportunity to bring the matter out into the open and the lady was able to prove to him that her words, which he had taken the wrong way, had in fact been intended to protect him from ridicule of others. Now he was again very happy. The clearest reference to this incident is contained in his compulsion to understand , the form of which is as if he had said to himself: ‘After this experience you must never again misunderstand anyone if you want to spare yourself unnecessary torment.’ But his resolution has not only been generalized from that single occasion but has also – perhaps because of his beloved’s absence – been displaced from her esteemed person on to every other poor wretch…Compulsive activity of this kind with two consecutive time-signatures, where the rhythm of the first cancels out the second, is a typical feature of obsessive-compulsive neurosis. It is of course misunderstood in the conscious thought processes of the patient and given a secondary motivation – i.e. rationalized.  Its true meaning lies in its depiction of the conflict between two more or less equally strong opposing impulses, opposites which, in my experience to date, are always those of love and hate.”

Rationalization

This intermixing of desire with harm is described by Freud when Lanzer tells the story of removing a rock from being in the way of his lady’s carriage, and then putting it back showing the ambivalence he has for his love. He also displayed these ambivalent behaviours with his other intimate relationships. “It was a matter of conscience to him not to hand anyone dirty paper notes; they carried bacteria of the most dangerous sort, which might harm the recipient. At that time I already had some faint sense of the connection between the neuroses and sexuality and so on another occasion I took the risk of asking my patient how he felt about this matter. ‘Oh, everything’s fine in that department’, he answered lightly, ‘I don’t go short. There’s more than a few good families where I play the kindly old uncle and now and again I take the opportunity to invite a young girl on an outing to the country. Then I arrange things so that we miss the train and have to spend the night in the country. I do things very handsomely; I always take two rooms, but when the girl is in bed I go in to hers and masturbate her.’ – ‘Are you afraid of doing her some harm when you use your dirty hand to work on her?’ – At this he exploded, however: ‘Harm? What do you mean, harm? I didn’t do any of them any harm, and they all liked it. Some of them are married already and it didn’t do them any harm.'” Freud viewed the excuses as a rationalization which allowed Ernst to let go of some of his scruples towards cleanliness so he could gain more pleasure than if he was more principled.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree

Freud returned back to Ernst’s father and this conflict between love and hate and how it affected his relationship decisions. His mother had arranged a marriage to a daughter of a cousin of hers when Lanzer finished his studies. Mahony identifies this family as “wealthy Saborsky relatives.” This would open up prospects for him from her side of the family. This scenario would be similar to what happened to his father before he married Ernst’s mother. Should he follow his heart and marry his admired lady or marry for prospects like his father? “He resolved this conflict, which was actually the conflict between his love and the continuing effect of his father’s will, by means of illness, or more precisely: he used his illness to escape the task of resolving it in reality…The principle outcome of the illness was a persistent inability to work, which caused him to defer conclusion of his studies for years…The conflict underlying the illness was essentially the clash between the continuing effect of his father’s will and his own inclinations as a lover.” To prove that his father’s decisions were working in Ernst’s unconscious, Freud used the patient’s transference, where a patient projects characteristics of authority figures in their life onto a new authority figure. He did this to Freud by elevating “a young girl whom he had once met on the steps of my house to the status of my daughter. He was attracted to her and started to imagine that I was only being so kind and unbelievably patient with him because I wanted him for a son-in-law; and that through this marriage he would enhance his wealth and refinement of my house to a level that would correspond to his own aspirations. Inside him, however, this temptation battled with his inextinguishable love for his mistress. After we had overcome instance after instance of the most powerful resistance and the most bitter insults, he could not escape the persuasive effects of the complete analogy between transference fantasy and past reality. I give as an example one of his dreams from this period as a sample of the representation style: he sees my daughter standing in front of him, but instead of eyes she has two filthy splodges. Anyone who understands the language of dreams will have no difficulty in translating this: he is marrying my daughter not for her lovely eyes, but for her money …He found himself in a situation that he knew or supposed to be the same as the one confronting his father before his own marriage, and was able to identify with his father.” We can also see here a sense of alienation that people go through, Eg. By not being able to satisfy a wish, one can create omnipotent thoughts that force the situation in one’s mind to a fantasy satisfaction and conclusion. Unfortunately if reality doesn’t change, the mind simply goes back to a depressed position. It’s a form of self-torture. This is also a clue to how people use proximity and grab what is available in the environment, and in memory, to solve problems. His father’s experience, for example, is a strategy to satisfy wishes and because Ernst is aware of it he can explore it. This constant vacillation between different objects of love is a way to see how people are constantly looking for the most accessible forms of pleasure that are available. The Pleasure Principle.

The Pleasure Principle: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html

Father as a ghostly presence

Going back into Lanzer’s infantile sexual development Freud inquired about his masturbation habits and if they were different from “typical behaviour….Our patient’s attitude to masturbation was a striking one: he did not practice masturbation in puberty…The urge to masturbatory activity manifested itself, on the other hand, in his twenty-first year, a short time after his father’s death . Each time, having achieved satisfaction, he was deeply ashamed and soon vowed to give up the habit. From then on he masturbated only rarely and for somewhat surprising reasons. He could be moved to do so when he experienced a particularly beautiful moment or read a particularly beautiful passage in a book.” Lanzer also masturbated when he experienced people flouting authority in real life and in books. “We may place in the same context his strange behaviour at a time when he was studying for an examination and was playing with a fantasy that he had become very partial to, namely that his father was still alive and might come back at any moment. At the same time he arranged his day so that his study was undertaken in the small hours of the night. He would break off his studies between midnight and 1 o’clock and open the front door of the apartment as if his father might be standing there; then, after he had come back in, he would unfasten his trousers and gaze at his penis in the hall mirror. It is easier to understand such antics if we assume that he was behaving as if he expected his father to visit him at the witching hour. When his father was alive he had been a somewhat lazy student, a fact that his father had often lamented. Now, if he returned as a ghost he should find him at his studies and be pleased with him. His father was most unlikely to take pleasure in the other aspect of his behaviour, however; in this way he defied him and gave simultaneous expression, by means of a compulsive action that he did not understand, to the two sides of his relationship with his father, just as he did to the lady he loved in his later compulsive action over the stone on the road.”

Psycho-archaeology

Delving deeper into Pompeii , as Freud alluded earlier, the flouting of authority went back to a childhood, possibly connecting with his earlier masturbation practices. Like with most early memories, they are covered up not just by unconscious repressions but also from parents who want avoid embarrassment. Freud explored “…the possibility that as a child of 6 he had committed some sexual misdemeanour relating to masturbation and received a painful beating from his father. While his punishment had put an end to the masturbation it had left him, on the other hand, with a grudge against his father and fixed him for all time in the role of an intruder upon sexual pleasure. To my great astonishment the patient now told me that his mother had recounted such an incident from his early childhood on many occasions, and that it had obviously not been forgotten because it had such remarkable associations. He, on the other hand, had retained no trace of it in his own memory. However the story was as follows: when he was still very young – it would be possible to determine the exact point in time because it coincided with the fatal illness of one of his older sisters – he was supposed to have done something awful for which he received a beating from his father. The little chap apparently got into a fearful rage and abused his father even as he was being beaten. Since he was not yet familiar with any terms of abuse, however, he called him by the names of all the objects which came into his mind, such as ‘You lamp, you towel, you plate’, etc. Shaken by this elemental outburst his father paused in mid-blow and remarked: ‘This boy will either be a great man one day, or a great criminal!’ He thought this scene had had a permanent impact on both himself and on his father. His father had never beaten him again; he himself attributes some part of the change in his character to this experience. From then on, terrified by the magnitude of his rage, he had become a coward. His whole life long, moreover, he had had a terrible fear of being beaten and would creep away, horrified and outraged, whenever one of his brothers or sisters was being caned…When he questioned his mother again she provided both confirmation of his narrative and also the information that he was aged between 3 and 4 at the time and had been punished because he had bitten someone. Even his mother could not remember any more; she thought – though with considerable uncertainty – that the person to whom the boy had caused injury might have been the children’s nurse; nothing she said suggested that the offense might have been sexual in nature.”

The most difficult part of psychoanalysis is to get at early memories, or to find evidence that proves an incident actually happened. Mahony says that, “…this one traumatic event was never…ratified in the treatment, for the most Dr. Lanzer could do was to report a tale that was repeated in the family but the events of which he had forgotten…As to the fact that the mother’s account contained no explicitly sexual element, Freud offered two explanations: either her censorship effaced the sexual material or there was no erotic meaning in the misdeed at all.” To get to possible other reasons for a quitting of masturbation, psychoanalysis has to delve into infantile sexual development.

If you remember from my early study of Freud’s sexual theories, the anal phase includes childhood reactions where the child holds back their stool and after staying too long on the pot it leads to parents chastising them. The punished child will often associate the pleasure of feces moving in and out of the anal sphincter with the messiness that is to be avoided in life and create a reaction formation by being “anal” and doing the opposite of messiness: Orderliness. The Phallic period is one where genital confidence is developed, but can revert back to anal behaviours. Here Freud didn’t elaborate much on this with Ernst Lanzer. Mahony tries to use contemporaneous events to see how this could happen. Lanzer’s sister Camilla died “when the little boy was three and a half – yet the consequential prolongation of the [forgotten] period was left unexplained. A greater lack-though understandable for the early state of psychoanalysis at the time – is that Freud did not yet see the essential relationship between anality and obsessional neurosis.” He quotes Gedo and Goldberg: “‘Freud explained the neurosis as a whole on the basis of repression of Oedipial hatred of the father as well as of the rejecting woman, followed by a dual regression: that of the libido from phallic aims to anal sadistic ones, and that of action to the sphere of eroticized thought.’ In the case at hand, he simply acknowledged the importance of anal eroticism in Ernst’s childhood, manifest in his early [playing with feces] and olfactory hypersensitivity as well as in the stimulation caused by rectal worms he had over a period of years. It is equally noteworthy that Freud made only sparing use of the concept of regression and did not express any understanding of the patient’s anal eroticism in that sense. Freud pointed out the unusual fact that Lanzer remembered his governess not by her first name but by her last, masculine-sounding name (Rudolf), an early indication of the part played by a homosexual object-sexual choice in the patient’s life. Freud’s comments to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society indicate that he may have considered the Rat Man’s homosexuality as fully emerging only in the latency period [the period before puberty]: ‘The basic conflict in this case lies, roughly speaking, in the patient’s struggle between his drive toward man and that toward woman (his drive toward man is stronger)….The patient already at such an early age clearly showed heterosexual inclinations and…his later homosexuality is in sharp contrast with these.'”

Mahony says that “since the Rat Man was obsessed with anal penetration, we might expect that the terminal parts of his utterances would be hyperinvested; and in reality, such was the case. It is as if his utterances at times were symbolic extensions of his corporeal schema where an investment was defensively displaced from the front to the anal region. The oath ‘May God protect him/her.’ A not would suddenly emerge from the Rat Man’s unconscious and turn the sentence into its opposite. As opposed to English, however, in German the negative  Nicht is appended to the end of the sentence so that it penetrates the formula just as the rats did the anus.”

Sexuality Pt. 2 – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtort-sexuality-pt-2-infantile-sexuality-sigmund-freud.html

An important influence that Freud didn’t explore was that of Ernst’s mother and sisters. Mahony describes how those early influences affected his heterosexual inclinations. “Ernst maintained that he loved his lady but had no sensual desire for her, a defensive maneuver further subjected to doubt and alternate periods of his loving her intensely and being indifferent to her. Not exploring the oedipal significance of the relationship, Freud kept Mrs. Lanzer and Gisela apart…In Ernst’s dreams ‘his sexual desires for his mother and sister and his sisters’s premature death were linked up with the young hero’s chastisement at his father’s hand.’ Apart from this passage, Freud was content to subsume his patient’s mother into a few oedipal statements. Nor did Freud [express] any oedipal conclusions from back-to-back associations that at the age of six the little Ernst complained about erections to his mother and felt that his desires to see girls naked were liable to cause his father’s death…One may want to argue that Freud had to be discreet and consequently filtered out many allusions to Mrs. Lanzer, who functioned as a controller of the purse strings and thus as a participant in the analysis. Yet as sound as that objection may be, it is surely not sufficient in itself. But if we seek elsewhere, a supplementary reason comes quickly into view to resolve our puzzlement. The relatively pallid picture of the Rat Man’s mother and the full-bodied picture of his father fit the lopsided pattern in Freud’s descriptions of both Dora’s and little Hans’s parents…Marcus’s incisive comment: the relative exclusion of the mother in Freud’s case histories ‘was characteristic of his culture as well, and one of the more strongly marked features of both the major novels and major autobiographies of nineteenth-century culture is the consistency with which they place the relation of father and child (particularly, of course, father and son) at the center of the human universe of development, passion and choice, and how relatively infrequently the relation of mother and child (with a few notable exceptions) occupies that paramount position. One can say that one of the themes of nineteenth-century literary culture has to do with the conflict surrounding this tendency to a suppression of the mother.'” Mrs. Lanzer was also an interferer in Ernst’s desires, like with his choice of a marriage partner. “…Mrs. Lanzer did not fail to criticize Gisela’s family as ‘futile persons’ and even forbade Ernst from going to the funeral of Gisela’s grandmother. If it is only probable that Mrs. Lanzer controlled her family’s financial affairs, it is certain that she was the strict administrator of Ernst’s inheritance. As the distributor of the analytic fees, did she force…ending of the treatment?”

“Already on the basis of the first several weeks of clinical material presented by Freud to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Rank opined that ‘all factors clearly point to the patient’s love for his mother, even though there has not yet been any direct reference to this in the analytic material’ …Freud replied that ‘Rank will probably prove to be right in his assumption that incestuous wishes for the mother play a  role, though the relationship is complicated by the presence of four sisters…The extant evidence allows us to draw a mixed picture of the interaction between Ernst and his mother. Her controlling nature, entrenched miserliness, ambivalent attitude toward neatness, and lack of the outbursts so characteristic of her husband and son indicate an obsessional personality with restrictive traits. If she was family-conscious, concerned about the comfort of her house, and even protective of her son against her violent husband, she could yet be critical, controlling, and dangerously seductive and phallic.”

Like in the ‘Little Hans’ case, the birth of new siblings creates a lot of emotional turmoil. Mahony says that, “…when he was living through the phase of gender consolidation, his privileged position as the only son in a family of daughters was undermined by the birth of a rival brother; when Ernst neared three, another sister was born; and nine months later, Camilla died. In general, Mrs. Lanzer hardly appears to be a preoedipal or oedipal mother who functioned as a consistent developmental stabilizer or as one who maintained an open dialogue with her son that would have constantly promoted and solidified ego functioning. She did not suffice for her son to deal with his unresolved distress, frustration, and rage; he turned then to other family members for gratifying solace and sustenance. We attain a clear idea of the oedipal constellation if we understand that Ernst’s sisters became substitute objects more approachable than his mother.” 

Case Studies: ‘Little Hans’ – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gu93b-case-studies-little-hans-sigmund-freud.html

Mahony found that much of what bothered Ernst in later life could be explained by his experiences with his sisters in the process notes. “Ernst’s first perception of sexual difference dating from his observation of Camilla on the pot; her declaration to him, ‘If you die I shall kill myself’; remembered scenes of her illness and death and the distressed reactions of himself and his parents; his fear that his own masturbation might have caused her death; and last, his experience of her death as a relief over a rival being eliminated, as [a warning] sign of what might happen to him if he continued to masturbate, and as the origin of his omnipotent belief that by giving or retaining love he could control life…Being a focus of Camilla’s oedipal strivings obviously intensified Ernst’s choice of her as his incestuous heterosexual object. If the one reported event of Ernst’s early biting is seen phasically, we might understand that to ward off the painful affects of anxiety and helplessness connected with Camilla’s impending loss, he regressed to the conflicts of the anal stage and the oral-sadistic rage he had brought into it. Occurring during the height of his oedipal phase, the catastrophic loss of the mother surrogate traumatically shaped his infantile neurosis.”

Mahony also describes the behaviour of making substitutes. “When Camilla died, the nine month old Olga might have been the object of Ernst’s deflected libido. We are on surer grounds when we postulate that at least during adulthood, Olga was his incestuously preferred sister and a choice object of sadistic-anal fantasies. The finicky brother brought himself to tell her, ‘Nothing about you would be disgusting to me’, a total acceptance no other woman in the case history receives. After the death of their father (the ‘interferer’), Ernst repeatedly attacked Olga and once ‘assaulted’ her; he even had to make a vow to keep away from her. Once he dreamed of copulating with her and of then being fearful for having broken his vow; upon waking and recognizing that he had only been dreaming, he was so delighted that he ‘went into her bedroom and smacked her bottom under the bedclothes’. Servants thought that Ernst and Olga kissed not like siblings but like lovers. Even her eventual husband became jealous to the point that Ernst said to him, ‘If Olga has a baby in 9 months’ time, you needn’t think I am its father; I am innocent.'”

Core complex of neuroses

Freud describes what is experienced by every child, which is a series of thwarted attempts at pleasure and why. He called it the “core complex of the neuroses.” As the layers of resentments pile up, resistance in the patient starts to be taken out on the analyst, Freud in this case, which is an expected hazard of being a therapist. “I will merely say that as a result of [the childhood scene] re-emergence he started to falter for the first time in his refusal to believe in feelings of rage against his beloved father, acquired prehistorically and subsequently lying dormant. I had expected the scene to have a more powerful effect, if anything, since he had been told of his event so often, by his father as well, that there was no doubt as to its reality. With a capacity to flout logic that is always particularly disconcerting in highly intelligent patients suffering from a compulsive disorder, he denied the value of the scene as evidence, protesting over and over again that he himself could not remember a thing about it. He was obliged therefore to come by the conviction that his relationship to his father did indeed need to be amplified by material from the unconscious by the painful route of transference. It soon came about that in dreams, daytime fantasies and arbitrary notions he would insult me and mine in the most coarse and offensive manner, yet at the same time he never intentionally showed me anything but the greatest respect. His behaviour when relating these insults to me was that of a desperate man. ‘Most honoured Professor, how can you allow yourself to be insulted in this way by filthy scum like me? You ought to throw me out; I don’t deserve any better.’ He would get up from the couch and walk around the room as he spoke, claiming at first that this was motivated by tact: he could not bear to say such terrible things while lying there in comfort. Soon he himself hit upon the more convincing explanation, however, that he was putting himself at arm’s length for fear that I would strike him. If he remained seated, he would conduct himself like a man seeking to protect himself in desperate anxiety from an intemperate beating: he would bury his face in his hands, cover his face with his arm, or run away suddenly, his features distorted with pain, etc. He recalled how his father would fall into sudden rages and in the violence of his feelings would no longer have any sense of how far he could go. In this school of suffering he gradually gained the conviction he had been lacking…” By bringing all those old memories up, including the actions of the father, mother, siblings, and the resentments they caused, the emotions over those incidents could be mourned by Lanzer.

Rat associations

Once rat associations could be connected with a painful complex it became clear how the obsessions could colour other concepts. Freud was able to connect the game of Spielratte , or “Gambling rat” to a game where his father lost money and couldn’t repay the debt. The rats burrowing in the victim’s anus could trigger associations of punishment related to pleasure holding back defecation and the sensations of worms that he had in childhood. The penetration could be associated with the penis. The penis can spread disease just like a rat can. Penetrating an anus can be associated with sewage where rats live and feed on excrement. When discussing Ibsen’s Little Eyolf , in analysis, the Rat-Wife commands rats, which could also be associated with children, like in the story of the Pied Piper , and Ernst’s desire to have children. “And now he provided a piece of information that he had withheld from its proper context for long enough, but which fully explained his interest in children. As a result of a gynaecological operation, the removal of both ovaries, the lady whose admirer he had been for so many years and yet could not bring himself to marry was condemned to childlessness; this was indeed the principal reason for his hesitation, since he was extraordinarily fond of children.” So many associations to rats created a symbol in him “designated to grate, on the complex of his feelings.”

Even if this appears far-fetched for some, more obvious examples of triggers can be references to sex, sexual orientation, race, bodily ugliness, mental illness and any references to low status that can trigger defense mechanisms. Lanzer was triggered by embarrassing desires and sources of shame with his family. Being mindful, you can catch yourself seeing words when you scan a text, and how it triggers a sore spot on your self-esteem. Sometimes you may see words that aren’t even there because your concern about a troubling subject matter related to yourself esteem is so consuming that the brain fills in the blanks. Notice how when the economy is good, people feel less sensitive, but when the economy crashes and people are struggling, it’s hard to find anything funny. You may have made fun of lots of people, but your circumstances have changed so much that now you are the target of jokes. Notice how hard it is to move beyond those negative labels that stigmatize and create a flurry of stressful thinking, suicidal thoughts, inhibition and inaction that prevents full development of yourself. Seeing it in your own life helps you to see how it is everywhere. Defense mechanisms can be masochistic and self-attacking, or sadistic where people redress slights with insults and violence externally. Being able to laugh at oneself and accept imperfections for as many wounds as you have, and to be less reactive to slights people give to you, cures the need to launch pre-emptive strikes on people, and cures the need for you to shrink away and avoid achieving your goals. As an adult you can’t change the past. You can only make new choices. In a modern environment people are sensitive to feeling insignificant or ridiculed because there are more signals in media and advertising displaying our inferiority. Understanding your impulses helps you to be able to control them. Then you can mourn past decisions and forgive your younger self for not knowing what you know now.

Sublimated revenge

After this review you can now go out into the world and understand its hostility much better. Lanzer took pleasure in thinking about obstacles meeting with an untimely end, but these fantasies have to brought to consciousness or they will look for other avenues. The typical way people discharge their frustrations if they can’t get revenge, is to resort to entertainment and addictions to numb the pain instead. For example, most people enjoy movies and TV shows that depict revenge that people can’t have in real life. The neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese, references René Girard. “[René] argues that actors on stage are symbolically sacrificed. In that way, society discharges its ever-present propensity for violence without doing harm.” To bring these unconscious intentions into consciousness allows us to predict how we will feel in competitive, insulting environments, and make better choices. One can spend more time with people who aren’t constantly triggering you. One can love and accept oneself with the understanding that most other people are the same and have one thing or another that causes them to feel shame. To see the toxic method of discharge, all you have to do is look at politics. Notice how many people actually direct attention to the weaknesses of others to bolster their own self-esteem.

Humor – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtm13-humour-sigmund-freud.html

Sublimation – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gv2fr-sublimation-sigmund-freud.html

Stalking: https://rumble.com/v1gvhk1-stalking-world-narcissistic-abuse-awareness-day.html

The Joker Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAGVQLHvwOY

Parasite Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isOGD_7hNIY

Once upon a time in Hollywood Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELeMaP8EPAA

‘Ratman’ to just Man

Whether Lanzer’s mother ended the sessions, or whether he was too busy to continue them, he behaved more assertively and returned to his studies. He became a lawyer, found employment and married Gisela. This was despite attending only a brief analysis with Freud. Questions still remained of how cured he really was. Certainly by marrying for love, instead of for money, the ghost of his father, and his mother’s influence, weakened. Of course there would have to be confirmation that he wasn’t marrying the woman, who could not bear children, to deprive his father of the continuation of his line. If that was the case then his father’s pathological presence would still be there. How he viewed Gisela based on his experience with his mother and sisters is too murky to have definite conclusions. Many parents use their power of inheritance to force matches. Marrying Gisela could be a way to defy his mother or she may have had similar characteristics to his sisters that he found attractive. The healthy choice would be to choose based on love that exists day in and day out for a person, and not on getting attention from authority figures. This way the marriage partner wouldn’t be treated as a means to an end. Ernst also had a tendency to idealize and devalue Gisela. People are more of a mix rather than an angel or devil. It’s not known if Lanzer could see beyond that dichotomy. There were also self-esteem issues. If Lanzer felt that people could read his mind, and know his thoughts, I wonder myself if a feeling of inferiority was involved in this magical thinking that people have these abilities that he doesn’t have. Are authority figures given too much reverence? An independent mind would be rid of that habit. Finally, Freud’s use of the primal scene, where children watch their parents have sex and develop theories of conception, was such an important part of his study of the ‘Wolfman’, but was actually more applicable to Lanzer’s case study. Sleeping in the same bed with his parents would be “over-stimulation”, and early introductions to male and female savouring of sexual pleasure could have introduced conflict on which form of savouring would be better to imitate. Any shame for homosexual impulses could create self-reproaches and be triggered by reminders of anal penetration, including triggers from the story about the rat torture. Unfortunately, very soon it was the breakout of WWI, and Ernst was enlisted. He was captured by the Russians on November 21, 1914 and died on November 25th. Freud himself was still in his early phase of his theories and around this time was finding challenges from within his own circle, notably Carl Jung and Alfred Adler who offered their own treatment methods and moved onto creating their own schools. Naturally Freud’s view of WWI would change a lot of his theories and advance them to include more darkness and depth that humanity displayed during that war.

The Wolfman and other cases – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780142437452/

Freud and the Rat Man – Patrick J. Mahony: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780300036947/

Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis – Steven Marcus: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781138993136/

The Violence and the Sacred – René Girard: https://rumble.com/v1gsnwv-the-origin-of-envy-and-narcissism-ren-girard.html

We Are All Stardust – Klein, Stefan: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781615190591/

Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

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The Case of Rat Man

A psychoanalytic understanding of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Thapaliya, Suresh

Department of Psychiatry, Nepalgunj Medical College, Kohalpur, Nepal

Address for correspondence: Dr. Suresh Thapaliya, Department of Psychiatry, Nepalgunj Medical College, C-8, C-Block, Doctor's Residence, Kohalpur-11, Banke, Nepal. E-mail: [email protected]

This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.

This article discusses case of Mr. Ernst Lanzer known as the “Rat Man” in the history of psychoanalysis. He was diagnosed as a case of obsessive-compulsive disorder by Sigmund Freud known as obsessional neurosis that time. The patient presented to Freud with number of distressing obsessions of which the main one was fear of a corporal punishment to his loved ones using rats. The patient underwent psychoanalytic treatment for his symptoms for 6 months following which he was declared cured. Freud has discussed the case in a published case note. Over the subsequent years, the case received wider attention from the psychoanalytic community and continues to be interpreted and discussed from different perspectives after nearly one century of his clinical interaction with Freud.

INTRODUCTION

In this section, we are discussing the case of Dr. Ernst Lanzer, published in case history as “ Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose ” or “Notes Upon A Case of Obsessional Neurosis” by Sigmund Freud in 1909.[ 1 ] This was the second of the six case histories that Freud published and the first in which he claimed that the patient had been cured by psychoanalysis.[ 2 ] The patient presented to Sigmund Freud with number of obsessions of which the main obsession was preoccupation with fear of rats. Freud himself referred affectionately to his patient as the Rattenmann (man of the rats), leading to the name used in the subsequent literature as the “Rat Man.”[ 3 ] In Freud's words, “rats had acquired a series of symbolic meanings, to which fresh ones were continually being added.” The patient underwent treatment for around 6 months after which he was declared cured by Freud. Freud originally presented the case of Rat Man in two sessions of the Wednesday Psychological Society in the Fall of 1907 and impressed the First International Psychoanalytic Congress at Salzburg in April of 1908 with the case while the patient was still in treatment.

We consider the case of the “Rat Man” an important landmark work of Sigmund Freud that helped in understanding of clinical presentation and psychoanalytic aspect of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), then termed “obsessional neurosis” by Freud. Although many have criticized Freud's handling of the case and the value of the treatment, strong praise of Freud's efforts continues to appear. Moreover, this case is the only one for which Freud's spontaneous nightly process notes are available.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

The biography of Ernst Lanzer was studied and many details were filled in after more than a century of his birth.[ 4 ]

Austrian lawyer Dr. Ernst Lanzer, the patient of Freud was born in Vienna on January 22, 1878. He had six siblings. The deaths of her sister in 1881, his father in 1899, and his aunt in 1901 were significant events in his life that changed the course of his personal and professional life.

In 1897, Lanzer joined in the Law Faculty of the University of Vienna, but he could not complete his doctorate until 10 years later, shortly before his analysis with Freud. His romantic relationship with the poor girl Giesla Adler was complicated due to symptoms of his illness and interference by his father. Lanzer entered into an analysis with Freud on October 1, 1907. After relief in the symptoms, he found his first employment in 1908 and secured his job as an attorney in 1913. He made a childless marriage with Giesla in 1908, 10 years after he first fell in love with her. In August 1914, during advent of the world war, he was activated into military service. He was taken prisoner in Russia on November 21, 1914, and died 4 days later.

CLINICAL PRESENTATION

Ernst Lanzer presented to Freud when he was a young man aged 29 years of University education. He was suffering from obsessional thoughts and behaviors since childhood. The symptoms had worsened over the past 6 years interfering with his completion of the state law examination after few years after his father's death. Ernst's father had never approved of his desire to marry his long-time girlfriend, Gisela and demanded that Ernst give her up.

The chief symptoms were fears that something might happen to two people he loved – his father and the lady whom he was loved and wished to marry. He had started having these fears when he had heard from military captain about a brutal punishment being practised in Eastern Europe in which pot full of wild rats were kept over back of the victim so that they would eat their way into the anal cavity. He had then started having irrational fear that his father and girlfriend could be a potential victim of such a torture. He would be involved in compulsive behaviors such as counting and even praying to ward off the possible evil. The thoughts would intrude into his mind so much that he had difficulty concentrating at his law studies. He also held belief that his mere thinking of such an evil could eventually lead to torture of the friendly father despite the fact that he had already died.

He had also reported of compulsive impulses such as an impulse to cut his throat with a razor. He had wasted years of life fighting against these ideas in his own words because of which he had lost the course of his life. He had tried various treatments without any significant improvement. Freud also observed during the first visit that he was frequently preoccupied about his sexual life. His predominant obsession that compelled him for seeking help was irrational fear about a torture that rats would eat their way into the anal cavity of the potential victims, his father and girlfriend. Freud called this “The Great obsessive fear.”

SUMMARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Freud's case note after a brief initial introduction discusses the details of the first seven sessions of the treatment. The patient speaks in the first person extensively his interactions with Freud for which he offers some commentary. Having explored the patients' score conflict by free association technique, Freud goes on to summarize the findings from rest of the analysis. First, he demonstrates the meaningfulness of the patient's symptoms surrounding the core conflict giving numerous examples of the adult patient's obsessions and their explanations. Next, Freud discusses the events that precipitated the neurosis and practically crippled the patient in his adult life. Then, in the final section, Freud traces the neurosis to a “father complex” that originated in the patient's childhood. Freud completes his analysis by returning to the proximate situation that brought the patient into therapy and offers a brilliant analysis of the formation of his main symptom.[ 3 ]

In the initial sessions the analysis, the patient reveals his childhood experiences related to sexuality from as young as 6 years of age. He was sexually intimate with a young woman, had strong wish to look women naked what Freud terms as “scopophilia” and recalled experiencing penile erections at the age of 6 years old. Freud hypothesizes that neurosis had already taken its shape since his early childhood, rooted in an erotic instinct, and a revolt against it and was associated with distressing affect and performance of defensive acts. He further emphasizes that obsessional neuroses are different from hysterias in that the factors which go to form a psychoneurosis are to be found in the patient's infantile sexual life and not in his present one. Further, Freud discusses about what he terms as the great obsessive fear, the fear of the rats from which the patient bears his famous name, “Rat Man.” Freud asserts that his fear of corporal punishments of his girlfriend and father had stemmed from conflicting ideas of loving and aggressive impulses relating to the people concerned – termed “ambivalence” by Eugen Bleuler. Freud hypothesizes that the obsessive wish got associated with an obsessive fear. Hence, the patient's obsessive fear when restored to its original meaning from childhood, would run as follows: “If I have this wish to see a woman naked, my father will be bound to die.”

When traced to childhood, it was further revealed that from the age of 12, he had fallen in love with a girl. Upon not being able to express his desire, he would have idea that she would be kind and attentive toward him if some misfortune would fall upon his personal life. Patient would then think of his father's death. Freud thus interprets that every fear corresponded to a former wish which was subsequently repressed. Freud further concludes that he had hatred for his father in the unconscious though his intense love prevented it from becoming conscious. Freud discusses that childhood neurosis develops out of residuum of early conflicts and repressions and obsessions could be given a sense in patient's mental life, so as to make them comprehensible and even obvious. Freud also claims that the most eccentric obsessive ideas can be cleared up if they are investigated deeply enough and brought into temporal relationship with the patient's experiences.

Freud gives several examples from patient's life wherein the obsessive symptoms could be explained in temporal relationship to the events surrounding them. In one instant, patient's girlfriend was away to care of her sick grandmother and he was trying his best to prepare for his examination. He suddenly had thought commanding himself to cut his throat with a razor and almost rushed to the cupboard to fetch his razor after which he had thought of killing the old woman instead. Freud's interprets this compulsive idea as a fit of rage to kill the old woman for creating obstacle in fulfilling his love for the lady whereas his suicidal thought was a punishment for the murderous passion. Freud gives the interpretation of the obsessional neurosis to the patient saying that the unconscious part of the self had become separated off from it in infancy, which had not shared the later stages of its development, and which had in consequence become repressed. It was the derivatives of this repressed unconscious that were responsible for the involuntary thoughts which constituted his illness.

In subsequent sessions of psychoanalysis, the patient describes about obsessional ideas surrounding death of his father. Freud interprets that something in the sphere of sexuality stood between the father and son. The evidence was the father had come into some sort of opposition to the son's prematurely developed erotic life such as prohibition of masturbatory acts in the childhood and opposition of relationship with the lady. Freud further emphasizes the temporal relationship between his romantic relationship and obsessions. Like in one instance he was compelled to count the thunderstorm repeatedly when he was hanging out with his girlfriend as a defensive measure against fears that she was in danger of death. Upon departure, patient had developed a compulsive and symbolic act of removing the stone from the road along which she was to drive, and then of undoing this deed of love by replacing the stone where it had lain, so that her carriage might meet accident and she herself be hurt. Freud asserts that patient was having a battle of love and hate and the object of both these feelings was one and the same person.

Near the end of the case note, Freud proposes that the rat idea is central to numerous meanings in patient's mental life, representing a number of his instincts. He particularly emphasized that the fear of rat boring way into the anal canal was related to anal eroticism; his father's filthy sexual excesses in the military; symbolism for the penis as a carrier of syphilitic infection; the desired punishment and death of his loved ones; his own greedy impunity; the proclivity to being persecuted, etc. Freud elaborates on such defense mechanisms as rationalization, doubt, undoing, and displacement that takes place in cases of obsessional neurosis. Interpreting about patient's compulsive behaviors, he discusses that compulsive acts occur in two successive stages, of which the second neutralizes the first, are a typical occurrence in cases of obsessional neurosis. The patient's consciousness naturally misunderstands them and puts forward a set of secondary motives to rationalize them. However, they also have representation conflict between two equal opposing impulses between love and hate.

SUBSEQUENT INTERPRETATIONS AND COMMENTS

There is currently an impressive body of literature on the case available that continues to develop.[ 3 ] The case has been reinterpreted from different perspectives such as the patient's structural dynamics, ego functions, including identity formation, object relations, interpersonal, and self-psychoanalysis and Freud's therapeutic practice in the case.[ 4 ]

A number of significant discrepancies between the published case history and Freud's process notes, which were discovered among his papers after his death, have been pointed out. Freud has also been accused of presenting muddled and inconsistent facts with omissions of information including overemphasis on the father to the exclusion of the mother's role in patient's life. The case also has been revisited and the role of conflicts in patient's relationship with the mother has been discussed.[ 5 ]

It has also been accused that Freud has made exaggerated claims about the treatment success. However, it has been generally accepted that Freud made the fundamental discoveries concerning the dynamics and structure of obsessional neurosis and obtained a certain degree of success in restoring his patient to functional life. Others have suggested that by concentrating on building rapport with his patient, at the expense of analyzing the negative transference, Freud merely achieved a temporary transference cure.

Although many have criticized Freud's handling of the case and debates about the value of his treatment have abounded, strong praise of Freud's efforts continues to appear. Moreover, this case is the only one for which Freud's spontaneous nightly process notes are available. It has been appreciated that Freud's interpersonal presence in this case shows such humanizing virtues as openness, respect, strength, mercy, trustworthiness, encouragement, and maternal acceptance at the heart of the therapeutic relationship.[ 3 ]

CURRENT IMPLICATIONS

At present, use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) along with behavioral therapy focused on exposure and response prevention, has emerged as the treatment of choice for OCD. As a result, there is rather strong criticism of the use of psychodynamic psychotherapies in treating OCD. The symptoms of OCD are generally regarded as meaningless and irrational and unresponsive to psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Yet, therapists have discussed that patients may gain substantial gains, at least as substantial as those achieved with behavior therapy and an SSRI-with long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy.[ 6 ] However, one critical point to keep in mind is that psychological therapies need to be individualized and same techniques may not be generalized to all the cases.

We conclude that the case of Rat Man is at least of historical importance to clinicians for the efforts put by Freud and subsequent interests shown by the psychoanalysts.

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Acknowledgment

Dr. Siddharth Sarkar, Assistant Professor Department of Psychiatry and National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Ansari Nagar, New Delhi - 110 029, India.

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The nickname used in the literature of psychoanalysis to refer to an early patient of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). The Rat Man was tormented by fantasies of rats gnawing at his father's anus and that of a woman to whom he was attracted. Freud's case study, published in 1909, entitled ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ (Standard Edition, X, pp. 155–320), is a classic text on the psychoanalytic theory of obsessive-compulsive disorder. See also undoing.

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The Case and the Signifier Generalization in Freud’s Rat Man Iracema Dulley *

Exploring Freud’s Rat Man case, this piece analyses the chain of signification that emerges in Freud’s articulation of the rat-related signifiers through which his patient’s neurosis is expressed. Two central concerns guide my reflection: (i) to question the divide between the individual and the social by showing how signifiers are one of the ways in which the symbolic inscribes itself onto the subject; (ii) to discuss how the case study as method proposes generalizations based on a singularity.

Keywords: Case study; Case method; Rat Man; Freud, Sigmund; Psychoanalysis; Signifier; Generalization; Obsessional neurosis

I thank Cheryl Schmitz, José Jakousi Castañeda Vázquez, Xenia Chiaramonte, Christopher Chamberlin, Jakob Schillinger, Daniel Barber, and Christoph Holzhey for their comments on previous versions of this text.

This piece explores Sigmund Freud ’s ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909)’, a.k.a. the Rat Man case. 1 1 Sigmund Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909)’, in Freud , The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. and trans. by James Strachey and others, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), x (1955) , pp. 153–318. Sigmund Freud , ‘Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose’, in Freud , Gesammelte Werke , 17 vols ( Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer , 1940–52) , vii : Werke aus den Jahren 1906–1909 (1941), pp. 380–463. In this classical case study, Freud describes the articulation of the symptoms of his patient Ernst Lanzer , a twenty-nine-year-old upper-middle-class lawyer from Vienna who is given the epithet of Paul. Through the reception of Freud ’s description in psychoanalysis, the Rat Man became a paradigmatic case of obsessional neurosis. Yet, Jacques Lacan draws our attention to the fact that ‘the main interest of this case lies in its particularity’. 2 2 Jacques Lacan , ‘Le mythe individuel du névrosé’, Ornicar? , 17–18 (1979), pp. 289–307 (p. 295). All English translations are mine unless otherwise specified. As the Rat Man case reduces obsessional neurosis to a particular instantiation of it — that of Paul’s subjectivity —, it simultaneously leaves open the scope of its generalization to the extent that it points to singularity as constitutive of subjectivity. In this essay, I propose that the particularity that makes this case study suitable to become paradigmatic is the clarity obtained from the reductiveness with which Freud articulates the chain of signification related to Paul’s symptoms in his case description. This seems to have happened through linguistic contagion.

Two central concerns guide my reflection: (i) to question the divide between the individual and the social by showing how signifiers are one of the ways in which the symbolic, that is, language as the Other, inscribes itself onto the subject; and (ii) to discuss how the case study as method proposes generalizations based on a singularity. In order to do so, I investigate both the description of obsessional neurosis proposed by Freud in his 1909 publication and the manuscript containing the notes that he produced during Paul’s treatment. 3 3 Sigmund Freud , L’homme aux rats: journal d’une analyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974). The complete manuscript was published in the German original and its French translation by Elza Ribeiro Hawelka with the collaboration of Pierre Hawelka and the authorization of Anna Freud. In this publication, the German original is published side-by-side with the French translation in a text that has a French title ( L’homme aux rats: journal d’une analyse ). Quotes are from the German original and translations are mine. The manuscript, one of the few that survived Freud ’s habit of destroying his notes after his texts were published, is of interest because his notes contain signifiers that are either absent from or not fully explored in his account of the case in 1909. Thus, although it is not possible to return to the scene of analysis itself, through the combination of Freud ’s notes with his case description one can reconstitute how Freud articulates the chain of signifiers that, according to him, articulated Paul’s symptoms in speech even though Paul’s capacity to hear the signifiers he uttered only emerged in the course of his analysis. This essay shows how, many decades before Lacan proposed that the meaning of the signifier is not fixed (‘le signifiant ne signifie absolument rien’), 4 4 Jacques Lacan , ‘Ouverture à la section clinique’, Ornicar? , 9 (1977), pp. 7–14 (p. 7). Freud used transference to draw on the metaphorical malleability of language in neurosis and thereby to displace the fixation that happens in the reduction of signification by the symptom.

The Case: Unveiling Generalization

The case points to the possibility of generalization while retaining the idea that, since what it portrays is a singularity, it also resists generalization. As Lauren Berlant affirms, ‘as genre, the case hovers about the singular, the general, and the normative.’ 5 5 Lauren Berlant , ‘On the Case’, Critical Inquiry , 33.4 (2007), pp. 663–72 (p. 664). The Rat Man case does not claim to contain all the features of obsessional neurosis; nor does it claim to state unequivocally what it is. Yet, to the extent that it names and describes a configuration of symptoms, it establishes a unit of analysis (obsessional neurosis as instantiated in Paul) in relation to which one can discuss both its conclusions and the way in which this unit of analysis is circumscribed. The case makes it possible to include in the narrative the aspects that one thinks constitute its most relevant features without necessarily excluding the existence of other relevant but unexplored ones. It is ‘actuarial’, i.e. it ‘bear[s] the weight of an explanation worthy of attending to and taking a lesson from’. 6 6 Ibid., p. 666. Thus, it implies that something like it has existed in the past and will probably exist in the future. It can serve as a parameter for elucidation to the extent that it is exemplary: as ‘an instance of something’, the case ‘is a genre that organizes singularities into exemplary, intelligible patterns, enmeshing realist claims […] with analytic aims’. 7 7 Ibid., p. 670.

According to Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel , the case points in the direction of the laws of the general and the universal without dissolving into them. 8 8 Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel , Penser par cas (Paris: Enquête, 2005), p. 12 < https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsehess.19921 >. In presenting the way in which a particular signifier — Ratte — makes obsessional neurosis apprehensible in Paul’s speech, Freud ’s case makes the general claim that a singular chain of signifiers articulates the obsessional neurosis of particular subjects. In this process, Rat Man acquires the opacity and malleability of a signifier. As a deictic, it ‘blindly directs the attention towards its referent without ever being able to completely define it’: Rat Man, as a proper name, allows the different understandings of those who are familiar with this Freudian case to be indexed to it. 9 9 Ibid., p. 12. Yet, if a case is ‘the exploration and deepening of the properties of a singularity accessible to the observation’ with the purpose of ‘extracting from it an argumentation of more general import, the conclusions of which could be reused to ground other intelligibilities or justify other decisions’, comparison becomes an implicit procedure. 10 10 Ibid., p. 9, their emphasis. In its self-referentiality, the case generalizes through its singularity. 11 11 Susan Wells, ‘Freud's Rat Man and the Case Study: Genre in Three Keys’, New Literary History , 34.2 (2003), pp. 353–66 (p. 357). The articulation of signifiers that gives expression to the Rat Man’s subjectivity is singular. Yet, it is generalizable that the configuration of a particular chain of signifiers occurs in the constitution of singular subjects — and this is something one verifies by comparing cases qua singularities that are both exceptional and exemplary.

The fact that Freud considers this case a successful one is an exception. 12 12 In Freud and the Rat Man (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), Patrick Mahony disagrees on the effectiveness of the treatment in his analysis of transference in the Rat Man case (p. 129), whereas in Rat Man: Freud’s 1909 Case (New York: New York University Press, 1986), Stuart Schneiderman considers the treatment to have been effective despite the fact that the analysis was interrupted. Both point to Freud ’s refusal to deal with the role of the mother in the structuring of Paul’s symptoms. I would suspend judgment on the question of effectiveness, not only because what cure is remains uncertain to the extent that defining it would depend on an impossible definition of normality, but also because Ernst Lanzer died in WWI a couple of years after the end of his treatment. Yet, I would argue that the capacity he acquired to hear his own signifiers in the course of analysis did displace his symptom — the fact that he got married to Gisela and regained his capacity to work is one of the indexes thereof. For different assessments of Freud ’s treatment of Paul, see Jerome Beigler, ‘A Commentary on Freud's Treatment of the Rat Man’, Annual of Psychoanalysis , 3 (1975), pp. 271–85 and Samuel Lipton, ‘The Advantages of Freud’s Technique as Shown in his Analysis of the Rat Man’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis , 58 (1977), pp. 255–73. His Dora case, for instance, is presented as an example of failed management of transference that led to the patient interrupting her treatment. 13 13 Sigmund Freud , ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905 [1901])’, in Freud , The Standard Edition , vii (1953), pp. 1–122. In the Rat Man case, Freud claims not to fully grasp the mechanisms that lead to the formation of obsessional neurosis in this and other cases despite having been able to cure it. This notwithstanding, through his simultaneous consideration of other cases of obsessional neurosis, he attempts to generalize on ‘the genesis and finer psychological mechanism of obsessional processes’ by means of implicit comparison. 14 14 Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 155. As his conclusions are presented as ‘some disconnected statements of an aphoristic character’ — a characteristic Freud ascribes to obsessional discourse in general —, he recognizes the limited scope of his generalizations. 15 15 Ibid. This remark makes one wonder how much the disconnected character of aphorisms bears a resemblance to the aleatoric laws that govern obsessional neurosis. That is, if one considers with Lacan that the analyst is a symptom, 16 16 Jacques Lacan , Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan , ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1973–), xxiii: Le Sinthome (1975–1976) (2005). to what extent does Freud ’s account mime the operation of obsessional neurosis? As will become clear in what follows, Freud ’s account of the case is pervaded by rat-related signifiers that seem to have entered it through obsessional contagion.

According to Freud , Paul sought treatment after having read a few pages of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life . Paul said he was impressed by Freud ’s ‘explanation of some curious verbal associations’ ( Aufklärung sonderbarer Wortverknüpfungen ) in that work. 17 17 Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 159; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 385. Thus, it seems that the patient’s transference with Freud , based on which he attributed to the psychoanalyst the capacity to deal with the causes that lead to paralysis in his life, was related to Freud ’s capacity to explain the strange association of words through which the patient’s symptoms — ‘fears’ (Befürchtungen), ‘compulsive impulses’ (Zwangsimpulse), and ‘prohibitions’ (Verbote) — were articulated. 18 18 Ibid., p. 158; p. 384. According to Freud , the unconscious is expressed in language differently in each kind of neurosis: while the language of hysteria leads to conversion into bodily symptoms, in obsessional neurosis the meaning of the patient’s spoken language is to be discovered behind the veil of generalization and indeterminateness.

This is what Freud says regarding the way in which generalization operates in obsessional neurosis — the example refers to Paul’s simultaneous fear of and wish for his father’s death:

Side by side with the obsessive wish, and intimately associated with it, was an obsessive fear: every time he had a wish of this kind he could not help fearing that something dreadful would happen. This something dreadful was already clothed in a characteristic indeterminateness [Unbestimmtheit] which was thenceforward to be an invariable feature of every manifestation of the neurosis. But in a child it is not hard to discover what it is that is veiled behind an indeterminateness of this kind. If the patient can once be induced to give a particular instance in place of the vague generalities [verschwommenen Allgemeinheiten] which characterize an obsessional neurosis, it may be confidently assumed that the instance is the original and actual thing which has tried to hide itself behind the generalization [Verallgemeinerung]. Our present patient’s obsessive fear, therefore, when restored to its original meaning, would run as follows: ‘If I have this wish to see a woman naked, my father will be bound to die.’ 19 19 Ibid., p. 163; pp. 388–89.

Thus, according to Freud , the idiom of generalization serves as a veil to the patient’s actual wish: Paul says ‘something dreadful’ could happen when he actually means that his father could die. For Freud , the difference between this procedure and what one finds in hysteria is not only of the order of sexuality, but also of the order of language:

The language of an obsessional neurosis — the means by which it expresses its secret thoughts — is, as it were, only a dialect of the language of hysteria; but it is a dialect in which we ought to be able to find our way about more easily, since it is more nearly related to the forms of expression adopted by our conscious thought than is the language of hysteria. Above all, it does not involve the leap from a mental process to a somatic innervation — hysterical conversion — which can never be fully comprehensible to us. 20 20 Ibid., pp. 156–57. Freud relates that patients suffering from obsessional neurosis have an early interest in and beginning of sexual activity, which is absent in the constitution of hysteria. This corresponds to the coupling of hysteria with a shock related to the experience of passive presexual stimulation experienced as disgusting and the coupling of obsessional neurosis with active presexual activity experienced as pleasant ( Mahony , Freud and the Rat Man ). Yet, this opposition is undone if one considers this quoted passage, in which obsessionality is understood to be ‘a dialect of hysteria’, i.e., hysteria of a certain kind.

Freud seems to be saying that differently from hysteria, in which conversion inscribes the symptom onto the body (as Lacan would put it, the signifier as metaphor), obsessional neurosis manifests itself mostly at the level of spoken language (the signifier as metonymy). When Freud says that obsessional neurosis is a dialect whose meaning is easier to grasp because it is ‘more nearly related to the forms of expression adopted by our conscious thought’, one wonders whether the majestic plural refers to Freud himself. In Freud ’s conception of language, language bears a homological, that is, representational, relation to the world — his reality principle resides in this supposition. 21 21 Susan Gal, ‘Politics of Translation’, Annual Review of Anthropology , 44 (2015), pp. 225–40. Thus, he conceives of language in the constative mode, that is, in the mode in which statements are judged to be true or false descriptions of a world external to language. 22 22 John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); Mary Pratt, ‘Ideology and Speech Act Theory’, Poetics Today , 7.1 (1986), pp. 59–72. Yet, Freud recognizes that the relationship between language and its supposed referents is not straightforward. For while the language of hysteria leads to conversion into bodily symptoms, in obsessional neurosis the meaning of the patient’s spoken language is to be discovered behind the veil of generalization.

In a footnote, Freud attempts to generalize the way in which ‘names and words’ are employed by obsessive and hysterical subjects. His contrastive generalization depends on a comparison of degree:

Names and words [Namen und Worten] are not nearly so frequently or so recklessly employed in obsessional neuroses as in hysteria for the purpose of establishing a connection [Verknüpfung] between unconscious thoughts (whether they are impulses or phantasies) and symptoms. 23 23 Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 189; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 411.

Hysteria is said to employ more ‘names and words’ to connect symptoms to the unconscious, whereas obsessional neurosis would employ fewer . Yet, Freud ’s observation is made in relation to a situation in which names and words play a crucial role. Paul starts to be concerned about his weight after meeting a man he considered a competitor for Gisela’s love, whose nickname was Dick, which in German means ‘fat’ as an adjective. After this attempted generalization, in which Freud claims that the example he gave is a somewhat rare one, he contradicts himself as he offers one more empirical instance in which a signifier (in this case a related one) operates in the same way in another case of obsessional neurosis:

I happen, however, to recollect another instance in which the very same name, Richard, was similarly used by a patient whom I analysed a long time since. After a quarrel with his brother he began brooding over the best means of getting rid of his fortune, and declaring that he did not want to have anything more to do with money, and so on. His brother was called Richard, and ‘ richard ’ is the French for ‘a rich man’. 24 24 Ibid.

One could say that just as behind Paul’s generalizations there is an attempt to disguise his simultaneous fear of and desire for the death of people towards whom his feelings are ambivalent, behind Freud ’s generalizations on obsessional neurosis one finds the Rat Man case. 25 25 Freud centres these wishes on the figure of the father, but his notes also reveal Paul’s mother and Gisela’s grandmother as the objects of similar wishes ( Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 156). For an assessment of the role of female figures in Paul’s neurosis, see Ruth Abraham and K. H. Blacker , ‘The Rat Man Revisited: Comments on Maternal Influences’, International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy , 9 (1982–1983), pp. 705–27. Freud ’s notes indeed reveal that Paul’s mother was a domineering figure who controlled his money ( Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 182). I agree with Schneiderman ’s interpretation that Paul’s oscillation between the richer cousin and the cousin he loved is related not only to the fact that Paul interiorized his mother’s interpretation that his father chose her over the poorer woman he loved but also to Paul’s oscillation between his sisters, who appear in Freud ’s notes as early objects of his desire ( Schneiderman , Rat Man ; Freud , L’homme aux rats , pp. 140–42, 164, and 246). The governess who is mentioned as Paul’s first seducer and is remembered by her ‘masculine-sounding’ last name, Rudolf, also appears to have been a domineering woman — which also calls into question Freud ’s affirmation that obsessional neurosis is related to the early enjoyment of an active sexual role. Béla Grunberger (‘Some Reflections on the Rat Man’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis , 47 (1966), pp. 160–68 (p. 162)) points to Paul’s ‘hesitat[ion] […] over his desire to identify with the anal-sadistic mother’ and Beigler (‘A Commentary’, p. 273) to his ‘intense identification’ with his mother. Yet, Freud ’s move is an ingenuous one: in presenting obsessional neurosis in the form of a case study that lays the ground for generalization, he both unveils the singularities on which his generalizations draw (the case that he describes and the other cases he mentions in footnotes) and points to the veil of generalization through which obsessional neurosis is constituted as a generalizable phenomenon. The example thus emerges as the singularity that generalization seeks to veil. According to Freud , this very procedure — that of producing a generalization based on singularities that are not always made explicit — also characterizes obsessional neurosis. Freud ’s procedure bears a strange familiarity with that of his patient but differs from it in that the disclosure of his method renders the similarity between their procedures ironic.

Just like the rat-related signifiers employed in chain by Paul articulate his symptoms, Freud ’s naming and description of the Rat Man case constitute it as a paradigmatic case of obsessional neurosis. ‘Rat Man’ (Rattenmann) is the epithet given by Freud to both the case and the individual at its core. 26 26 The epithet already appears in a letter sent to C. G. Jung in 1909. This act of naming brings to the fore the torture method by which Paul was disturbed and the centrality of the rat-related signifiers in the articulation of his symptoms. Naming the case after the rat that obsessively occupied Paul’s thoughts approximates him to the animal he feared. Implicitly, the compulsion that characterizes obsession is thus compared to the rat whose means of escaping from its own conundrum implies trying, but failing, to escape. This is why Lacan affirms that the case receives its name from a fantasy. 27 27 Lacan , ‘Le mythe’.

The Rat Man is singularized through the making proper of that which was originally a common name or, better said, two common names: ‘rat’ (Ratte) and ‘man’ (Mann). In this juxtaposition, the autonomy of man as human is questioned by the contagion of animality that emerges when this man is said to be of the rat kind: Rattenmann can be translated as (i) ‘Rat Man’, that is, a man who is a rat; (ii) ‘the man of rats’, that is, the man who has something to do with rats (‘l’homme aux rats’, as the case is known in French); (iii) through approximated homophony, it can also mean ‘the indebted man’, for Ratenmann , ‘installment man’, points to debt of a postponed kind, postponement being one of the effects of debt in Paul’s life. 28 28 Rattenmännchen , the diminutive of Rattenmann , is used in reference to male rats (I thank Jakob Schillinger for this insight). This signifier does not appear in Freud ’s account but resonates the association between rats and children discussed below. Whereas for Freud Paul’s neurosis revolves around his paralysis by doubt and indecision, Lacan relates it to debt: 29 29 Lacan , ‘Le mythe’. On the role of debt in obsessional neurosis, see Moustapha Safouan, ‘The Signification of Debt in Obsessional Neurosis’, pp. 77–82, and Charles Melman, ‘The Rat Man’, in Obsessional Neurosis: Lacanian Perspectives , ed. by Astrid Gessert (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 83–92 as well as Martha N. Evans, ‘Introduction to Jacques Lacan’s Lecture: The Neurotic’s Individual Myth’, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly , 48.3 (1979), pp. 386–404. Evans highlights how the institution of the name of the father entails the connection between the subject and the symbolic through an unpayable debt. Paul’s unpayable debt to his father; the debt of his father towards the friend who saved his father from ruin after his father gambled away the military’s money (which is rearticulated in Paul’s imaginary as his debt to one of his colleagues); his father’s indebtedness to his mother, a rich woman, to whom his father owed his upward social mobility; Paul’s guilt over the suicide of a woman whose love he dismissed. The automatism of repetition in Paul’s compulsions and thoughts, overdetermined by the paralysing manifestation of debt in the form of guilt, fear, and compulsion, bears a strange resemblance to the instinctual nature of rats. This resemblance is captured in the name Freud attributed to this case.

Singularity and the Signifier

As already stated, my reading of the work of the signifier in the Rat Man case is based on the chain of signification found in the case and in Freud ’s notes. As far as the relationship between the utterances proffered in the analytic setting and the publication of the case in writing is concerned, the psychoanalytic case stands in between what Lacan calls énonciation and énoncé , for the signifiers that appear in the case were once uttered but have been reduced to writing. Whereas the énoncé , i.e. that which is uttered, can be fixated in writing, the énonciation , i.e. the performative act of uttering as it happens in analysis, is not transposable to the written form. Yet, the chain of signification that emerged in the analysis of Paul can be retraced through Freud ’s writing, in which the Lacanian concept of the signifier is absent but the role of Wortlaut (roughly translatable as ‘wording’) in the articulation of neurosis is underlined.

What are the effects of the chain of signifiers mobilized in the Rat Man case? The work of the signifier in analysis depends on its being voiced in the psychoanalytic situation. In the latter, through transference, the subject emerges as it articulates the chain of signification that constitutes it. Thus, in relation to the dynamic situation of analysis, the articulation of a chain of signification in the case study might appear as a reduction of the transferential work through which Paul emerged as a subject to an empty and opaque chain of signification. Yet, as the analytical process is fixated in writing, this chain of signification appears to be made up of signifiers that, in their opacity, are simultaneously subjective and social, singular and generalizable.

As already mentioned, it is impossible to have direct access to the work of the signifier as it happened in Paul’s analysis through Freud ’s text. Writing indexes the situation in which signifiers were uttered ( énonciation ) but halts the potential for flotation that resides in the act of speaking, for writing reduces signifiers to meaning as it fixates them (thus transforming them into énoncé ). Yet, this question can be displaced if one thinks of the chain of signifiers that emerges in the Rat Man case as a production resulting from the encounter of the unconscious of Paul and the unconscious of Freud mediated through the German language, the medium through which contagion was possible. In this case, the opposition between the written and the oral, the individual and the social, is blurred, for spacing and displacement in time characterize the work of the signifier in both its oral and written instantiations. 30 30 Jacques Derrida , ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Derrida , Dissemination , trans. by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 61–171. In what follows, transference appears as the medium for transposing the work of the signifier through which Paul emerged as a subject in the analytic setting into a chain of signification made up of opaque signifiers that are simultaneously subjective and social, singular and generalizable, and can therefore be displaced as they float.

In Freud ’s case, the rat-related chain of signification articulates Paul’s symptoms: doubt, indecision, paralysis. It operates in a reductive mode to the extent that the way in which signifiers are articulated overdetermines the possibilities of action and experience of this particular subject. And yet, the emergence of this specific articulation of signifiers in the course of Paul’s analysis is the condition of possibility for their displacement — and their displacement, to the extent that it relies on analysis, i.e. on the encounter with Freud ’s unconscious, is social. After Lacan , one can advance the claim that this is the reason why Freud could consider Paul to be ‘cured’, that is, relieved of these specific symptoms. The chain of signifiers articulated by Paul reveals what Lacan calls the ‘individual myth of the neurotic’ to which his symptoms are connected. Through transference with Freud , in whom the signifiers voiced by Paul resonate nachträglich (afterwards or a posteriori), i.e. can be attached to different signifieds as they are allowed to float through Freud ’s Deutung (‘interpretation’ or, more literally, ‘indication’), the fixity of their relation to his symptom is undone. Let us explore the particularity of the chain of signifiers the case mobilizes and its relationship to ‘the individual myth of the neurotic’.

In the beginning of his narrative, Freud poses the following question:

What can have been the meaning of the child’s idea that if he had this lascivious wish [of seeing a woman naked] his father would be bound to die? Was it sheer nonsense? Or are there means of understanding the words and of perceiving them as a necessary consequence of earlier events and premises? 31 31 Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 164.

In the original in German, Freud speaks not of ‘words’ but of a ‘sentence’: ‘Ist das barer Unsinn, oder gibt es Wege, diesen Satz zu verstehen, ihn als notwendiges Ergebnis früherer Vorgänge und Voraussetzungen zu erfassen?’ . 32 32 Freud , ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 389. This combination of words is indeed not only a sentence in the grammatical sense, as implied by the German Satz , but also one in the legal sense if one thinks of a legal sentence in English. Thus, the rules that guide the Rat Man’s ‘individual myth’ articulate the relationship between language and the law frequently pointed at in Lacanian psychoanalysis. The language in which this injunction is articulated produces effects: Paul’s desire to see a naked female body leads to his fear (and wish) that his father, who stood in the way of the concretization of his desire, might die. Paralysis in his life is related to this sentence, in both senses of the word. One more sentence is to be added to it — the one pronounced by Paul’s father in the childhood scene recounted by his mother, in which upon being beaten by his father for having bitten his nurse, Paul calls his father the names of various objects. His father’s reaction is to stop beating him and pronounce the following sentence directed at Paul’s mother: ‘The child will grow up to be either a great man or a great criminal!’. 33 33 Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 205. Where Freud and his commentators have usually seen in this scene Paul’s imperfect mastery of language, for Stuart Schneiderman this sentence both puts Paul in the position of an object that is talked about and points to the centrality of the mother, for whom the father might have been a decorative object in the house like the ones Paul named. 34 34 Schneiderman , Rat Man .

‘A captain with a Czech name’ is presented by Freud as the person who unleashed the worsening of Paul’s symptoms by telling him about a ‘horrible punishment used in the East’: ‘the criminal [der Verurteilte] was tied up … […] a pot was turned upside down on his buttocks … some rats were put into it … and they … […] bored their way in …’. 35 35 Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 166; ‘Bemerkungen’, pp. 391–92. Paul, who accused himself of being a ‘criminal’ to both the friend who advised him to be treated and to Freud , was unable to complete the sentence he uttered only with much difficulty, having the analyst fill in the gap by naming the victim’s anus. Paul feared that this punishment might be inflicted on the woman he loved and on his father, although the latter was deceased. To avoid that this fantasy might happen, he adopted two ‘defensive measures’ ( Abwehrmassregel ): a ‘but’ (in German, aber , later modified to abér , a signifier whose sound approximates Abwehr , ‘defense’) accompanied by a gesture of repudiation, and the phrase ‘whatever are you thinking of?’ (Was fällt dir denn ein?). 36 36 Ibid., p. 167; p. 392. Mahony associates the stress placed on the last syllable of the word with Paul’s anal fixation. He brilliantly reads the contamination of defense by drive in time as he foregrounds the ambiguity contained in the conjunction aber , both disjunction (but) and conjunction (again). The same seems to be the case in the ‘apotropaic formula’ Glej(i)samen , which Paul employed to prevent evil from happening to Gisela as he masturbated thinking of her. In this formula, Gisela’s name is coupled to Samen , sperm, hinting at the possibility of producing children ( Mahony , Freud and the Rat Man , pp. 58–59). Yet, the addition of ohne Ratten ( Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 176) to the formula undoes this imaginary action. Here, the distinction between word and gesture collapses as both are reduced to the status of a ritual of avoidance in which signifiers that were part of his analysis seem to take part (analysis is thus literally transformed into a defense mechanism). As in magic, the performative juxtaposition of words and their effects is to be contrasted with ‘the peculiar indeterminateness of all his remarks’ (die eigentümliche Unbestimmtheit aller seiner Reden). 37 37 Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 167; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 392. Such indeterminateness, which Freud also associates with Paul’s tendency to vaguely generalize, was overdetermined by the singular articulation of a chain of signifiers.

This strange juxtaposition of language, gesture, and the magical effects of their conjunction is followed, in Freud ’s case, by Paul’s account of his debt. His account brings to the fore one aspect Freud presents as central to obsessional neurosis: the ‘ mésalliance […] between an affect and its ideational content’ ( eine Mesalliance zwischen Vorstellungsinhalt und Affekt ). 38 38 Ibid., p. 175; p. 399. During his military exercises, Paul received a pair of glasses that had been paid for by someone else. He was therefore to reimburse this person. He rationally knew that he merely had to send the payment to the woman who worked at the post office. Yet, in his mind, he came up with a myriad of complicated forms of repaying this debt in order to follow the self-imposed command that he should pay a specific colleague, in a phantasmatic instantiation of his father’s unpaid debt to his friend. Thus, a situation that could have easily been solved gave rise to Paul’s state of anguish. Freud recognizes the role of chance and wording in the unleashing of Paul’s neurosis both in his notes and in the case description:

Now it happened by chance — for chance may play a part in the formation of a symptom, just as the wording may help in the making of a joke — that one of his father's little adventures had an important element in common with the captain's request. His father, in his capacity as non-commissioned officer, had control over a small sum of money and had on one occasion lost it at cards. (Thus he had been a 'Spielratte' [literally ‘game rat’; gambler].) He would have found himself in a serious position if one of his comrades had not advanced him the amount. 39 39 Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 210; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 430. For Freud ’s discussion of chance and wording, see Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 216.

Paul’s father now appears in the position of the rat, and the kind of rat he is said to be — a ‘game rat’ (a gambler) — is one determined by debt. It so happened that the captain who had told Paul the story of the rat torture also mistakenly told him that he was to reimburse one of his comrades (a ‘Kamerad’) who had paid for his glasses — ‘Kamerad’ being another word in which the rat insinuates itself through homophony, establishing the bond between the gambler and the friend who saved his reputation as a bond between rats. 40 40 The word Kamerad is to be found in Freud , ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 430. Paul’s extreme affective reaction was unleashed by this chance happening: a person who Paul thought to be violent articulated two signifiers of the chain that was connected to the configuration of his symptoms. As the captain reminds Paul of the debt he unwillingly acquired when someone paid for his glasses, Paul is put in a similar position to his father — a position he associates with rats. He does not know whether his father ever managed to pay the debt that haunts him. Moreover, to his father’s debt towards his friend is added his father’s debt towards Paul’s mother. This debt, which is replicated in the suggestion by Paul’s mother that he marry a well-off cousin instead of the poor woman he loved, is connected to Paul’s obsessional complex through the word heiraten , in German, ‘to marry’. Through marriage, he would reproduce his father’s action and thus become indebted like his father, a Spielratte , a man whose actions of gambling and marrying up are connected, in Paul’s spoken unconscious, to the parasitical being of the rat: both tormentor and victim.

Freud is very clear about the fact that in this case, association is also related to the sound of words, not only to their content. Although the writing of the case might have the effect of congealing words, when Freud speaks of Wortlaut he is pointing to both the articulation of ideas and the dynamic character of sound in speech: He speaks of the ‘Wortbrücke Raten-Ratten’, that is, of a ‘verbal bridge’ between these two words. 41 41 Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 213; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 433. For Freud , cure would follow the discovery of the unconscious content (Vorstellung) that lies at the origin of this heightened affective load, whereas for Lacan this affect is related to the signifier. 42 42 Lacan is frequently credited with a re-reading of Freud in which the unconscious is thought of as being structured as a language. Although Freud did not engage with the linguistic turn, I agree with Lacan ’s affirmation in ‘Ouverture à la section clinique’ that the centrality of language is already to be found in Freud . Since signifiers float, the relationship between affect and signifier can undergo a short-circuit in the course of analysis through which fixation in the coupling of signifier and affect is undone. That is, there is no original content to be excavated; there are relations whose displacement can occur as they are repeated in speech. There is no concept of the signifier in Freud , but the ‘symbolic’ does make an adjectival appearance: ‘rats had acquired a series of symbolic meanings, to which, during the period which followed, fresh ones were continually being added’ (die Ratten hatten […] eine Reihe von symbolischen Bedeutungen erworben, zu welchen in der Folgezeit immer neue hinzutraten). 43 43 The references for this and the next quote are: Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 213; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 432. It is thus the ‘verbal bridge’ that connects installments ( Raten ) and debt to rats ( Ratten ) and torture that unleashes Paul’s ‘anal erotism’, which Freud connects to imaginary anal penetration. Although not present in the case description, one more signifier is mentioned by Freud in the meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on 8 April 1908, the first occasion on which he presented the case while still working on it: raten , as Freud states that Paul ‘admits that he does not distinguish between Ratten (rats) and raten (to guess)’. 44 44 Mahony , Freud and the Rat Man , p. 80. Otto Rank, who wrote a brief report of Freud ’s presentation on the occasion, does not make any reference to the role played by language in obsessional neurosis. Instead, he highlights the role played by the coexistence of feelings of love and hate towards the same person and its manifestation in the forms of obsession, doubt, and a paralysis of will. It might be the case that the role of language in the manifestation of Paul’s symptoms had not yet been articulated by Freud . See Otto Rank, ‘Bericht über die I. private Psychoanalytische Vereinigung in Salzburg am 27. April 1908’, Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse , 1.3 (1910), pp. 125–26.

Transference as Raten

Freud associates the rat with the penis based on the fact that ‘rats are carriers of dangerous infectious diseases’ and being in the army was associated with the possibility of acquiring syphilis. 45 45 Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 214. It is unclear from his case account whether this association was established by the patient or by himself, but the notes reveal that it was Freud who interpreted that a rat was a penis, following which Paul developed a sequence of Oedipal associations. 46 46 Beigler, ‘A Commentary’, p. 278. In the case notes, Freud clearly states: ‘rats mean fear of syphilis’ (Ratten bedeutet Syphilis-Angst). 47 47 Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 166. For Patrick Mahony , the association between rat and penis points to Paul’s ambivalence, castration anxiety, and fear of success. 48 48 Mahony , Freud and the Rat Man , p. 53. This also appears in Freud ’s notes, in which Paul’s dream of having a tooth extracted is interpreted by Freud as castration and Paul’s loss of his glasses — which, according to Schneiderman , enabled him to exercise his voyeurism — as establishing an association between loss of erection and cowardice. 49 49 Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 248. Schneiderman , Rat Man . In line with his downplaying of female figures in the case analysis, Freud leaves out of the case description the association between rat as penis and Paul’s mother’s braid, which he used to hold as a child and which he designated as a ‘Rattenschweif’ (a rat’s tail). 50 50 Freud , L’homme aux rats , pp. 172 and 134. It was probably the phallic character of Paul’s mother — who was similar to Freud ’s own mother in that respect, this being a possible reason for her elision from the case description — that contributed to Paul’s development of the theory that sexual intercourse happens through the anus. 51 51 Ibid., p. 230. This is probably why he came to the conclusion, also absent from the case description and written down only in the notes, that ‘to be married consists of showing each other one’s buttocks’ (verheiratet sein besteht darin, dass man sich gegenseitig den Po zeige) — a conclusion to which Paul came as he saw his mother’s buttocks while lying in bed with her. 52 52 Ibid., p. 234.

It is the sound of rat , in German, that promotes the association between rats ( Ratten ), debt (implicit in Raten , ‘installments’), and marriage ( heiraten ). There is one German word that is not mentioned by Freud as a relevant signifier but would easily fit into this chain of associations and could be related to Paul’s transference: Rat , that is, ‘advice’, 53 53 However, ‘to give advice’ (Rat geben) appears in Freud ’s notes ( Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 236). which can also mean a way out of a difficult situation — in this case, Paul’s identification with both the criminal and the rat. 54 54 This also seems to be the case in Frederick Wertz’s depiction of Paul as a ‘jailed criminal’ in ‘Freud’s Case of the Rat Man Revisited: An Existential-Phenomenological and Socio-Historical Analysis’, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology , 34.1 (2003), pp. 47–78. Freud , as a Berater or Ratgeber , i.e. advisor, stood in a hierarchical relation to Paul, who usually looked up to him as the person who could put an end to his neurosis. This relationship, both friendly — Freud sounds very similar to Freund , ‘friend’ in German — and hierarchical, is hinted at by Freud as he discusses how transference places him in the position of Paul’s father. This is made clear through a further association between rats and children: Paul pitied rats out of his own identification with them since childhood, when he was violently punished by his father for biting someone. Yet, as will become clear below, Freud also occupied a hierarchically subordinate position in transference despite not having acknowledged this in the case description. 55 55 The fact that one of Freud ’s children was also called Ernst might have played a role in Freud ’s understanding of his place in transference as that of the father.

In Paul’s speech, rats also stand for children. Freud says that as Paul was talking about the Rat-Wife in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf , who in Freud ’s notes is identified with Paul’s mother, it ‘became impossible to escape the inference that in many of the shapes assumed by his obsessional deliria rats had another meaning still — namely, that of children ’. 56 56 Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 215. This is, according to Freud , the original reason why Paul identified with the rat: a sharpened-teeth animal that can bite but is persecuted by humans with cruelty. He pitied rats out of his own identification with them since childhood, and the reason for his indecision as to whether he should marry ( heiraten ) the woman he loved was connected to the rat complex in one more way: he loved children and she had undergone an operation that made her incapable of bearing any. Yet, at the same time, Freud ’s notes also reveal that since Paul did not identify with his father’s choice of marrying up, he also did not want to ‘betray’ (verraten) the woman he loved. 57 57 Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 194. Simultaneously, as an ambivalent son, he reproached himself for not having ‘advised’ (zuraten) his father to take care of his health as much as he thought he should. 58 58 Ibid., p. 198.

There are further transferential associations connected to the rat-related chain of signification that Freud does not explore. In Freud ’s interpretation, the rat is also connected to money, a relation that appears in transference as Paul comes up with a ‘rat currency’ to calculate the price of his analysis sessions: ‘Soviel Gulden soviel Ratten’, that is, ‘So many florins, so many rats’. 59 59 Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 213. ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 433. This association acquires sexual meaning as Paul associates Freud ’s name with ‘Freudenhaus’ (a brothel): 60 60 Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 158. the sessions were conducted in the analyst’s home; one of his daughters appears in Paul’s dream and deliria as having feces (i.e. money) in the place of her eyes and is assimilated to the rat complex in the position of the richer woman Paul’s mother wanted him to marry; one of Paul’s dreams instantiates his childhood fantasy that children are produced through the contact between the anuses of the parents: it pictures a coitus between Freud ’s wife and Freud ’s mother in which their anuses are united by a herring, the same fish Paul was served and refused to eat when he was offered a meal at Freud ’s house. 61 61 For an appreciation of the impact of Freud ’s feeding Paul on his analysis, see Beigler, ‘A Commentary’.

As Ruth Abraham and K. H. Blacker suggest, despite Freud ’s tendency to see himself as occupying the position of Paul’s father in transference, the association between Gulden and Ratten actually put him in the position of a prostitute, ‘certainly a reflection of [Paul’s] attitude toward his own women-dominated house, with his mother viewed as the Madame who charges her fee’. 62 62 Abraham and Blacker , ‘Rat Man Revisited’, p. 718. It was indeed the case that the person who put pressure on Paul for him to marry the richer cousin and was in charge of the money he inherited upon his father’s death was his mother, with whom he seems to have identified Freud . To the extent that Paul’s delirium about the price of the session — ‘Soviel Gulden soviel Ratten’ — also appears as Paul considers how much money he needs to disburse to have sex with his lover, it points to the fact that he sees the price of the analysis session as equivalent to the price of a session of sexual intercourse. 63 63 Freud , L’homme aux rats , pp. 190–92.

Freud occupies the position of a prostitute in a different way as he tries to guess — in German, raten or erraten — in order to fill in the gaps in Paul’s narrative. As Paul mentions the narrative that unleashed the crisis that led him to seek Freud , he puts the analyst in the position of the torturer who will punish the ‘criminal’ (Paul), something that is marked by him calling Freud ‘Captain’ (Hauptmann). 64 64 Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 169; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 394. Mahony proposes to see this scene of analysis as one of ‘acting in’:

the very mimetic manner of the Rat Man’s expression turned it from being a discourse that simply narrates to one that enacts, performs; its very style and delivery in and through themselves constituted an enactive meaning. To be more specific: after initially voicing his resistance, the Rat Man went on, for one long uninterrupted paragraph in Freud ’s text, to introduce the narrative setting of the rat torture. With that accomplished, his gaping delivery elicited Freud ’s narrative participation in a complementary movement of thrust and counterthrust. 65 65 Mahony , Freud and the Rat Man , p. 103, his emphasis.

In Mahony ’s reading, Freud ’s guessing of the missing signifiers in this scene is the equivalent of the anal penetration that Paul both feared and desired: a ‘verbal happening’ in which ‘the Rat man multiplied holes in his sentences which Freud filled with correct guessing — erraten ’. 66 66 Ibid., pp. 104 and 105. Freud recognized the sexual component of this session but did not explore anality in his case description as much as he explored other aspects of obsessionality. As far as transference is concerned, his silence on the matter fits well with his striving towards the sublimation of homosexuality. The same kind of defensiveness seems to contagiously affect Mahony ’s language as he speaks of ‘anal rape in lexical installments’ where one might also have asked whether this was not a mutually enjoyable (in the Lacanian sense) situation. 67 67 Ibid., p. 106. This notwithstanding, I agree with Mahony that as Paul paid in rats, he both submitted to Freud and treated him as a prostitute. 68 68 Ibid., p. 107. Here the signifier Unrat , absent from both the case and the notes, but still implied as the imperfect opposite of Rat , points to the analyst’s position as rest, waste, and excess — which Freud acknowledges in the notes as he affirms ‘but I cannot guess’ (ich kann aber nicht erraten [ sic ]). 69 69 Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 158. From this position, which supposes the acceptance of castration, it becomes visible that the only alternative to anguish is to relinquish the fantasies that lead to imaginary castration: Paul’s conundrum as Rat Man lies in his incapacity to choose, that is, to relinquish ( entraten ).

As a guessing prostitute, Freud was, according to Mahony , looking for ‘the locality at which the repressed breaks through’ in obsessional neurosis, which is ‘word presentation and not the concept attached to it’. 70 70 Mahony , Freud and the Rat Man , p. 287. Thus, for Mahony , obsessional ideas are said to unite ‘the most disparate things under a single word with multiple meanings’: Through words that are ambiguous, ‘obsessional ideas are clothed in a characteristic verbal vagueness in order to permit such multiple development.’. 71 71 Ibid., pp. 287 and 288. That is, the vagueness of obsessional discourse is related to the way in which different ideas can be organized around the materiality and opacity of the signifier: Wortlaut .

Concluding Remarks: Wortlaut , the Subject, and the Social

Freud calls the reader’s attention to the role of wording in the chance articulation of Paul’s neurosis: ‘It was almost as though Fate, when the captain told him his story, had been putting him through an association test: she had called out a “complex stimulus-word” […], and he had reacted to it with his obsessional idea’ ( Das Schicksal hatte ihm in der Erzählung des Hauptmannes sozusagen ein Komplexreizwort zugerufen, und er versäumte nicht, mit seiner Zwangsidee darauf zu reagieren ). 72 72 Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 216; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 435. Paul does not hear the rat-related chain of signifiers before analysis although he is the one who articulates it. This is because, paradoxically, ‘the patients themselves do not know the wording [ Wortlaut ] of their own obsessional ideas’ ( die Kranken den Wortlaut ihrer eigenen Zwangsvorstellungen nicht kennen ). 73 73 Ibid., p. 223; p. 441. They do not know the wording of their ideas, but place value in how they sound: ‘words have value for him’ ( Worte haben Wert für ihn ). 74 74 Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 216. In his notes, Freud associates Paul’s interrogation of death with the sound of the word sterben as he reproduces the scene in which the patient asks this question: ‘What does death mean? As if the sound of the word should tell him’ ( Was heißt denn ‘sterben’? Als ob der Laut des Wortes es ihm sagen müßte ). 75 75 Ibid., p. 202. The centrality of death and the desire to control it is also related to rats in Paul’s speech as he ‘wishes people rats’ ( jemandem Ratten wünschen) , that is, wants them to die, whenever they force him to make a decision. 76 76 Ibid., p. 222.

The fixed and partially unrecognized articulation of signifiers that is connected to the fully functioning neurosis is destabilized during the work of analysis, when ‘the patient, who has hitherto turned his eyes away in terror from his own pathological productions, begins to attend to them and obtains a clearer and more detailed view of them’. 77 77 Ibid., p. 223. This idea is in itself not new to those familiar with the psychoanalytical technique. What is of special interest to our discussion is how one of the precepts of obsessional thought attributed by Freud to his patients guides his own analysis of the case. It is the extraordinary character of the articulation of signifiers that express Paul’s symptoms that allows Freud to articulate his generalizations on obsessional neurosis. Like his obsessive patient, Freud generalizes based on one example. Yet, to the extent that this is brought to the fore, the case remains open to being displaced by other cases labeled as cases of obsessional neurosis. The singularity of the Rat Man case relates to the fact that in it the role played by signifiers in the dialect spoken by the subject as he articulates his neurosis is especially clear. Through the depiction of this singularity, Freud is able to state that this occurs in obsessional neurosis in general as he implicitly compares this case with other cases and chooses it for its exemplary character.

According to John Forrester , the case, the ‘style of reasoning dominant in psychoanalysis’, opposes the Aristotelian idea that ‘there can only be a science of the universal and the necessary’. 78 78 John Forrester , Thinking in Cases (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), p. 4. Since practical wisdom, which is based on individuals, and therefore on particulars, is not considered knowledge in the Aristotelian tradition, no knowledge of individuals is possible. Yet, the syllogistic reasoning proposed by Aristotle depends on ‘an inductively derived generalization to further particulars’. 79 79 Ibid., p. 5. This proposition by Forrester comes from John Stuart Mill ’s idea that the general is only necessary because people’s memory is insufficient and general propositions are derived from inferences that involve only particulars. In Forrester ’s reading of Mill , ‘reasoning is always from particulars to particulars, because the general form of a proposition, or the general class to which particulars belong, are simply names, or marks as he calls them, which we employ because of our fallible memories.’ 80 80 Ibid., p. 6.

Thus, the names employed in generalizing processes bear a relation of non-juxtaposition with the things they name, i.e. no relation of correspondence between labels and what they designate follows from the fact that they try to make up for the limitations of memory. The case study as method recognizes this fact to the extent that the scope of the generalization it claims remains open. As implied by Forrester , reasoning goes from particulars to generals (which are themselves particulars) and then back to particulars. This is to say that the insights it produces will be based on the possibility that they might be applicable in the next instance of a given named phenomenon, but whether this will be the case or not can only be decided in view of a particular situation. Since the ‘permeability [of the case] invites corrective or amplifying uptake’, the extent to which it might be generalizable in the future remains uncertain. 81 81 Wells, ‘Freud’s Rat Man’, p. 363. It will be provisionally determined upon encountering another case.

As far as the relationship between the individual and the social or the particular and the general is concerned, one cannot tell beforehand in what ways it will be manifested in each case. However, one can expect it to be found in processes of subject constitution, for if the signifier ‘represents a subject […] for another signifier’ and the signifier pertains to the realm of the symbolic, there is no such thing as an individual subject. 82 82 Jacques Lacan , The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis , ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 198. Because subject constitution is both singular and social, it is not possible to fully distinguish the articulation of the rat-related chain of signification by Paul during analysis from its rendering in Freud ’s narrative. In Freud ’s notes, it is not always possible to differentiate Paul’s speech from Freud ’s writing, and ‘rat’ as a core signifier seems to have emerged gradually during analysis: ‘the rat story becomes more and more of a node’ (die Rattengeschichte wird immer mehr ein Knotenpunkt), Freud observed in his notes on 8 December 1907. 83 83 Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 178. This is due (i) to the impossibility of accessing the ‘original’ scene, in which analysis took place and words were uttered, through a written text that tries to make sense of it a posteriori in order to propose a somewhat unified narrative of how obsessional neurosis operates and (ii) to the fact that signifiers pertain to the realm of the symbolic, and as such are social.

On 3 June 1909, Freud wrote a letter to C. G. Jung in which he stated: ‘I suddenly feel like writing about the Salzburg rat man.’ On 30 June of the same year, he told his then friend: ‘I am too deep into my rats’, while at the same time admitting that the case study he was writing was far from being an exact reproduction of what he actually found in the clinic. 84 84 These two quotes are to be found in Mahony , Freud and the Rat Man , p. 84. What follows is my translation of Freud ’s remark to Jung concerning the distance between the case study and clinical experience: ‘What bungling are our reproductions, how wretchedly do we tear the great works of art of psychic nature’ (Was für Pfuschereien sind unsere Reproduktionen, wie jämmerlich zerpflücken wir die großen Kunstwerke der psychischen Natur!), in Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung , Briefwechsel (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1984), p. 117. Paul’s rats became Freud ’s rats through the medium of language. Freud acknowledged this and joked about it with Jung , the friend from whom he expected recognition as he asked his opinion on the case in a letter from the same year. Jung not only reassured him that his manuscript was good but also shared with Freud his own considerations on rats. In the course of this exchange, Paul’s rats became Freud ’s rats and then Jung ’s rats — as Octave Mannoni reminds us, Freud ’s Deutung of the connections between rats, syphilis, children, and penis in Paul’s analysis owes much to Jung ’s archetype of the rat. 85 85 Octave Mannoni , ‘L’homme aux rats’, Les temps modernes , 20.228 (1965), pp. 2028–47.

Paul’s signifiers articulate his symptoms in a very particular way, but in so doing reveal the general mechanism of obsessional neurosis. It is thus through the singular instantiation of obsessionality in Paul’s symptom that one can grasp its general, and therefore social, character. If the signifier does not mean anything, it is because its crystallization is as arbitrary as it is necessary. 86 86 Lacan , ‘Ouverture’. Not meaning anything in particular, the signifier is both material and opaque, and these characteristics make it possible for meaning to be both condensed in the chain of signification that articulates Paul’s symptoms and displaced in analysis as Paul gradually hears the import of the sound of the words he articulates as he speaks about his symptoms.

Something similar seems to happen with the German word Wortlaut , the term employed by Freud to refer to Paul’s phrasings. One might say that the erasure of sound and emphasis on wording in the common use of the German word Wortlaut points to a repression of the materiality of this signifier that is similar to the one occurring in obsessional neurosis, in which one utters an idea but does not listen to what its sound implies. Paul did not perceive the import of the rat-related signifiers he articulated because (and although) they were at the surface of his discourse. Similarly, Wortlaut contains in its materiality the importance of sound to wording that its use tends to erase. Nachträglich , one can hear in Freud ’s Wortlaut echoes of the materiality of Lacan ’s signifier. For like the signifier, theorization, and thus generalization, is also social.

• I thank Cheryl Schmitz, José Jakousi Castañeda Vázquez, Xenia Chiaramonte, Christopher Chamberlin, Jakob Schillinger, Daniel Barber, and Christoph Holzhey for their comments on previous versions of this text. ↵
• Sigmund Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909)’, in Freud , The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. and trans. by James Strachey and others, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), x (1955) , pp. 153–318. Sigmund Freud , ‘Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose’, in Freud , Gesammelte Werke , 17 vols ( Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer , 1940–52) , vii : Werke aus den Jahren 1906–1909 (1941), pp. 380–463. ↵
• Jacques Lacan , ‘Le mythe individuel du névrosé’, Ornicar? , 17–18 (1979), pp. 289–307 (p. 295). All English translations are mine unless otherwise specified. ↵
• Sigmund Freud , L’homme aux rats: journal d’une analyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974). The complete manuscript was published in the German original and its French translation by Elza Ribeiro Hawelka with the collaboration of Pierre Hawelka and the authorization of Anna Freud. In this publication, the German original is published side-by-side with the French translation in a text that has a French title ( L’homme aux rats: journal d’une analyse ). Quotes are from the German original and translations are mine. ↵
• Jacques Lacan , ‘Ouverture à la section clinique’, Ornicar? , 9 (1977), pp. 7–14 (p. 7). ↵
• Lauren Berlant , ‘On the Case’, Critical Inquiry , 33.4 (2007), pp. 663–72 (p. 664). ↵
• Ibid., p. 666. ↵
• Ibid., p. 670. ↵
• Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel , Penser par cas (Paris: Enquête, 2005), p. 12 < https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsehess.19921 >. ↵
• Ibid., p. 12. ↵
• Ibid., p. 9, their emphasis. ↵
• Susan Wells, ‘Freud's Rat Man and the Case Study: Genre in Three Keys’, New Literary History , 34.2 (2003), pp. 353–66 (p. 357). ↵
• In Freud and the Rat Man (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), Patrick Mahony disagrees on the effectiveness of the treatment in his analysis of transference in the Rat Man case (p. 129), whereas in Rat Man: Freud’s 1909 Case (New York: New York University Press, 1986), Stuart Schneiderman considers the treatment to have been effective despite the fact that the analysis was interrupted. Both point to Freud ’s refusal to deal with the role of the mother in the structuring of Paul’s symptoms. I would suspend judgment on the question of effectiveness, not only because what cure is remains uncertain to the extent that defining it would depend on an impossible definition of normality, but also because Ernst Lanzer died in WWI a couple of years after the end of his treatment. Yet, I would argue that the capacity he acquired to hear his own signifiers in the course of analysis did displace his symptom — the fact that he got married to Gisela and regained his capacity to work is one of the indexes thereof. For different assessments of Freud ’s treatment of Paul, see Jerome Beigler, ‘A Commentary on Freud's Treatment of the Rat Man’, Annual of Psychoanalysis , 3 (1975), pp. 271–85 and Samuel Lipton, ‘The Advantages of Freud’s Technique as Shown in his Analysis of the Rat Man’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis , 58 (1977), pp. 255–73. ↵
• Sigmund Freud , ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905 [1901])’, in Freud , The Standard Edition , vii (1953), pp. 1–122. ↵
• Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 155. ↵
• Jacques Lacan , Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan , ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1973–), xxiii: Le Sinthome (1975–1976) (2005). ↵
• Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 159; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 385. ↵
• Ibid., p. 158; p. 384. ↵
• Ibid., p. 163; pp. 388–89. ↵
• Ibid., pp. 156–57. Freud relates that patients suffering from obsessional neurosis have an early interest in and beginning of sexual activity, which is absent in the constitution of hysteria. This corresponds to the coupling of hysteria with a shock related to the experience of passive presexual stimulation experienced as disgusting and the coupling of obsessional neurosis with active presexual activity experienced as pleasant ( Mahony , Freud and the Rat Man ). Yet, this opposition is undone if one considers this quoted passage, in which obsessionality is understood to be ‘a dialect of hysteria’, i.e., hysteria of a certain kind. ↵
• Susan Gal, ‘Politics of Translation’, Annual Review of Anthropology , 44 (2015), pp. 225–40. ↵
• John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); Mary Pratt, ‘Ideology and Speech Act Theory’, Poetics Today , 7.1 (1986), pp. 59–72. ↵
• Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 189; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 411. ↵
• Freud centres these wishes on the figure of the father, but his notes also reveal Paul’s mother and Gisela’s grandmother as the objects of similar wishes ( Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 156). For an assessment of the role of female figures in Paul’s neurosis, see Ruth Abraham and K. H. Blacker , ‘The Rat Man Revisited: Comments on Maternal Influences’, International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy , 9 (1982–1983), pp. 705–27. Freud ’s notes indeed reveal that Paul’s mother was a domineering figure who controlled his money ( Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 182). I agree with Schneiderman ’s interpretation that Paul’s oscillation between the richer cousin and the cousin he loved is related not only to the fact that Paul interiorized his mother’s interpretation that his father chose her over the poorer woman he loved but also to Paul’s oscillation between his sisters, who appear in Freud ’s notes as early objects of his desire ( Schneiderman , Rat Man ; Freud , L’homme aux rats , pp. 140–42, 164, and 246). The governess who is mentioned as Paul’s first seducer and is remembered by her ‘masculine-sounding’ last name, Rudolf, also appears to have been a domineering woman — which also calls into question Freud ’s affirmation that obsessional neurosis is related to the early enjoyment of an active sexual role. Béla Grunberger (‘Some Reflections on the Rat Man’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis , 47 (1966), pp. 160–68 (p. 162)) points to Paul’s ‘hesitat[ion] […] over his desire to identify with the anal-sadistic mother’ and Beigler (‘A Commentary’, p. 273) to his ‘intense identification’ with his mother. ↵
• The epithet already appears in a letter sent to C. G. Jung in 1909. ↵
• Lacan , ‘Le mythe’. ↵
• Rattenmännchen , the diminutive of Rattenmann , is used in reference to male rats (I thank Jakob Schillinger for this insight). This signifier does not appear in Freud ’s account but resonates the association between rats and children discussed below. ↵
• Lacan , ‘Le mythe’. On the role of debt in obsessional neurosis, see Moustapha Safouan, ‘The Signification of Debt in Obsessional Neurosis’, pp. 77–82, and Charles Melman, ‘The Rat Man’, in Obsessional Neurosis: Lacanian Perspectives , ed. by Astrid Gessert (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 83–92 as well as Martha N. Evans, ‘Introduction to Jacques Lacan’s Lecture: The Neurotic’s Individual Myth’, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly , 48.3 (1979), pp. 386–404. Evans highlights how the institution of the name of the father entails the connection between the subject and the symbolic through an unpayable debt. ↵
• Jacques Derrida , ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Derrida , Dissemination , trans. by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 61–171. ↵
• Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 164. ↵
• Freud , ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 389. ↵
• Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 205. ↵
• Schneiderman , Rat Man . ↵
• Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 166; ‘Bemerkungen’, pp. 391–92. ↵
• Ibid., p. 167; p. 392. Mahony associates the stress placed on the last syllable of the word with Paul’s anal fixation. He brilliantly reads the contamination of defense by drive in time as he foregrounds the ambiguity contained in the conjunction aber , both disjunction (but) and conjunction (again). The same seems to be the case in the ‘apotropaic formula’ Glej(i)samen , which Paul employed to prevent evil from happening to Gisela as he masturbated thinking of her. In this formula, Gisela’s name is coupled to Samen , sperm, hinting at the possibility of producing children ( Mahony , Freud and the Rat Man , pp. 58–59). Yet, the addition of ohne Ratten ( Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 176) to the formula undoes this imaginary action. ↵
• Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 167; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 392. ↵
• Ibid., p. 175; p. 399. ↵
• Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 210; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 430. For Freud ’s discussion of chance and wording, see Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 216. ↵
• The word Kamerad is to be found in Freud , ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 430. ↵
• Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 213; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 433. ↵
• Lacan is frequently credited with a re-reading of Freud in which the unconscious is thought of as being structured as a language. Although Freud did not engage with the linguistic turn, I agree with Lacan ’s affirmation in ‘Ouverture à la section clinique’ that the centrality of language is already to be found in Freud . ↵
• The references for this and the next quote are: Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 213; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 432. ↵
• Mahony , Freud and the Rat Man , p. 80. Otto Rank, who wrote a brief report of Freud ’s presentation on the occasion, does not make any reference to the role played by language in obsessional neurosis. Instead, he highlights the role played by the coexistence of feelings of love and hate towards the same person and its manifestation in the forms of obsession, doubt, and a paralysis of will. It might be the case that the role of language in the manifestation of Paul’s symptoms had not yet been articulated by Freud . See Otto Rank, ‘Bericht über die I. private Psychoanalytische Vereinigung in Salzburg am 27. April 1908’, Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse , 1.3 (1910), pp. 125–26. ↵
• Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 214. ↵
• Beigler, ‘A Commentary’, p. 278. ↵
• Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 166. ↵
• Mahony , Freud and the Rat Man , p. 53. ↵
• Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 248. Schneiderman , Rat Man . ↵
• Freud , L’homme aux rats , pp. 172 and 134. ↵
• Ibid., p. 230. ↵
• Ibid., p. 234. ↵
• However, ‘to give advice’ (Rat geben) appears in Freud ’s notes ( Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 236). ↵
• This also seems to be the case in Frederick Wertz’s depiction of Paul as a ‘jailed criminal’ in ‘Freud’s Case of the Rat Man Revisited: An Existential-Phenomenological and Socio-Historical Analysis’, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology , 34.1 (2003), pp. 47–78. ↵
• The fact that one of Freud ’s children was also called Ernst might have played a role in Freud ’s understanding of his place in transference as that of the father. ↵
• Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 215. ↵
• Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 194. ↵
• Ibid., p. 198. ↵
• Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 213. ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 433. ↵
• Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 158. ↵
• For an appreciation of the impact of Freud ’s feeding Paul on his analysis, see Beigler, ‘A Commentary’. ↵
• Abraham and Blacker , ‘Rat Man Revisited’, p. 718. ↵
• Freud , L’homme aux rats , pp. 190–92. ↵
• Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 169; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 394. ↵
• Mahony , Freud and the Rat Man , p. 103, his emphasis. ↵
• Ibid., pp. 104 and 105. ↵
• Ibid., p. 106. ↵
• Ibid., p. 107. ↵
• Mahony , Freud and the Rat Man , p. 287. ↵
• Ibid., pp. 287 and 288. ↵
• Freud , ‘Notes upon a Case’, p. 216; ‘Bemerkungen’, p. 435. ↵
• Ibid., p. 223; p. 441. ↵
• Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 216. ↵
• Ibid., p. 202. ↵
• Ibid., p. 222. ↵
• Ibid., p. 223. ↵
• John Forrester , Thinking in Cases (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), p. 4. ↵
• Ibid., p. 5. ↵
• Ibid., p. 6. ↵
• Wells, ‘Freud’s Rat Man’, p. 363. ↵
• Jacques Lacan , The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis , ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 198. ↵
• Freud , L’homme aux rats , p. 178. ↵
• These two quotes are to be found in Mahony , Freud and the Rat Man , p. 84. What follows is my translation of Freud ’s remark to Jung concerning the distance between the case study and clinical experience: ‘What bungling are our reproductions, how wretchedly do we tear the great works of art of psychic nature’ (Was für Pfuschereien sind unsere Reproduktionen, wie jämmerlich zerpflücken wir die großen Kunstwerke der psychischen Natur!), in Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung , Briefwechsel (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1984), p. 117. ↵
• Octave Mannoni , ‘L’homme aux rats’, Les temps modernes , 20.228 (1965), pp. 2028–47. ↵
• Lacan , ‘Ouverture’. ↵

Bibliography

• Abraham, Ruth , and K. H. Blacker , ‘The Rat Man Revisited: Comments on Maternal Influences’, International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy , 9 ( 1982 –1983), pp. 705–27
• Austin, John , How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962 )
• Beigler, Jerome , ‘A Commentary on Freud's Treatment of the Rat Man’, Annual of Psychoanalysis , 3 ( 1975 ), pp. 271–85
• Berlant, Lauren , ‘On the Case’, Critical Inquiry , 33.4 ( 2007 ), pp. 663–72 < https://doi.org/10.1086/521564 >
• Derrida, Jacques , ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Derrida, Dissemination , trans. by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981 ), pp. 61–171
• Evans, Martha N. , ‘Introduction to Jacques Lacan’s Lecture: The Neurotic’s Individual Myth’, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly , 48.3 ( 1979 ), pp. 386–404 < https://doi.org/10.1080/21674086.1979.11926883 >
• Forrester, John , Thinking in Cases (Cambridge: Polity, 2017 )
• Freud, Sigmund , ‘Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose’, in Freud, Gesammelte Werke , 17 vols ( Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer , 1940–52) , vii : Werke aus den Jahren 1906–1909 ( 1941 ), pp. 380–463
• Freud, Sigmund ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905 [1901])’, in Freud, The Standard Edition , vii ( 1953 ), pp. 1–122
• Freud, Sigmund L’homme aux rats: journal d’une analyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974 )
• Freud, Sigmund ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909)’, in Freud, The Standard Edition , x ( 1955 ) , pp. 153–318
• Freud, Sigmund The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. and trans. by James Strachey and others, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953 –74)
• Freud, Sigmund , and Carl Jung , Briefwechsel (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1984 )
• Gal, Susan , ‘Politics of Translation’, Annual Review of Anthropology , 44 ( 2015 ), pp. 225–40 < https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-013806 >
• Grunberger, Béla , ‘Some Reflections on the Rat Man’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis , 47 ( 1966 ), pp. 160–68
• Lacan, Jacques , The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis , ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1998 )
• Lacan, Jacques ‘Le mythe individuel du névrosé’, Ornicar? , 17–18 ( 1979 ), pp. 289–307
• Lacan, Jacques ‘Ouverture à la section clinique’, Ornicar? , 9 ( 1977 ), pp. 7–14
• Lacan, Jacques Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan , ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1973 –), xxiii: Le Sinthome ( 1975 –1976) ( 2005 )
• Lipton, Samuel , ‘The Advantages of Freud’s Technique as Shown in his Analysis of the Rat Man’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis , 58 ( 1977 ), pp. 255–73
• Mahony, Patrick , Freud and the Rat Man (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986 )
• Mannoni, Octave , ‘L’homme aux rats’, Les temps modernes , 20.228 ( 1965 ), pp. 2028–47
• Melman, Charles , ‘The Rat Man’, in Obsessional Neurosis: Lacanian Perspectives , ed. by Astrid Gessert (London: Routledge, 2018 ), pp. 83–92 < https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003076254-6 >
• Passeron, Jean-Claude , and Jacques Revel , Penser par cas (Paris: Enquête, 2005 ) < https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsehess.19921 >
• Pratt, Mary , ‘Ideology and Speech Act Theory’, Poetics Today , 7.1 ( 1986 ), pp. 59–72 < https://doi.org/10.2307/1772088 >
• Rank, Otto , ‘Bericht über die I. private Psychoanalytische Vereinigung in Salzburg am 27. April 1908’, Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse , 1.3 ( 1910 ), pp. 125–26
• Safouan, Moustapha , ‘The Signification of Debt in Obsessional Neurosis’, pp. 77–82
• Schneiderman, Stuart , Rat Man: Freud’s 1909 Case (New York: New York University Press, 1986 )
• Wells, Susan , ‘Freud's Rat Man and the Case Study: Genre in Three Keys’, New Literary History , 34.2 ( 2003 ), pp. 353–66 < https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2003.0024 >
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Freud’s Case Studies: The Rat Man

In 1907, Sigmund Freud treated a young attorney in his late twenties named Ernst Lanzer, who was suffering from unbearable obsessive thoughts and compulsions.  The young patient was especially worried that “something terrible” would happen to two people — his father and the woman with whom he was in love.  In this course, we will carefully study Freud’s published case history of the so-called “Rat Man,” which illuminates his theories of the unconscious, of obsessional neurosis, and of psychoanalytic treatment.  Supplemental readings will be suggested, and no prior knowledge of Freud is necessary.  This will be the first in a series of classes that focus upon Freud’s most influential clinical case studies.

What the Voyage of the Beagle was to Darwin, case studies were to Freud. Freud’s case histories are more than just compelling character profiles and lively literary narratives; they are the transformational investigations that inaugurated the body of knowledge and clinical practices that became psychoanalysis, the so-called “talking cure.” Among the most fascinating and influential of these is the case of the so-called “Rat Man,” the story of one man’s obsessional compulsions that is also a provocative inquiry into the many psychological meanings of money, religion, masculinity, sado-masochism, and more. Instructor Loren Dent will guide students through a close reading of the original case history, relevant secondary literature, and reflections on the meanings of the “Rat Man” case for the development of psychoanalysis and Freud’s thought. This course offers an opportunity for an in-depth engagement with one of the foundational case histories in psychoanalysis and a watershed text in Freud’s oeuvre, and will grant a multifaceted perspective — at once historical, literary, and clinical — otherwise unavailable outside of the context of formal psychoanalytic training.

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The Rat Man was a pseudonym given by Sigmund Freud to his patient Ernst Lanzer (1878 —1914), to protect his anonymity when his case study was published.

Some Remarks on a Case of Obsessive-compulsive Neurosis

The case study was published in 1909 in German . Freud saw the Ratman for about a year, and considered the treatment a success.

The patient was presented with obsessional thoughts and with behaviors which he felt compelled to carry out. The thought for which the case received its name was the idea that a torture he had heard about from a military officer having to do with rats eating away at one's body might happen to someone who was dear to him, specifically his father or the woman he admired. Freud theorized that this and similar thoughts were produced by conflicts consisting of the combination of loving and aggressive impulses relating to these people .

The Ratman also often defended himself against his own thoughts. He would have a secret thought that he wished his father would die so he could inherit all of his money , and then he would shame himself by fantasizing that his father would die and leave him nothing . The patient even goes so far as to fantasize about marrying Freud's daughter so that Freud would have more money.

In addition, the symptoms were believed to keep the patient from needing to make difficult decisions in his current life , and to ward off the anxiety which would be involved in experiencing the angry and aggressive impulses directly. The patient's older sister and father had died, and these losses were considered, along with his suicidal thoughts and his tendency to form verbal associations and symbolic meanings .

Freud believed that they began with sexual experiences of infancy, in particular harsh punishment for childhood masturbation , and the vicissitudes of sexual curiosity. In the case study Freud elaborates on his terms ' rationalization ', ' doubt ', and ' displacement '

In a footnote Freud laments that long term follow-up of this case was not possible, because the patient was killed in World War I.

Rat Man, 77-78, 87-89, 235-238 Ecrits

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Freud's 'transference': Clinical technique in the 'Rat Man' case and theoretical conceptualization compared

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• PMID: 28758204
• DOI: 10.1111/1745-8315.12687

A considerable gap exists between clinical psychoanalytic concepts and psychoanalytic practice. It can be traced back to the early beginnings of psychoanalysis and to Freud's own handling of concepts that he had developed himself. Focusing on the concept of 'transference' that Freud in several steps coined so precisely from his experiences with hysteric patients and especially from his understanding of the 'Dora' case, it can be shown that he - seen from today - could not fully apply the meaning of his own concept in the later treatment of the so-called 'Rat Man'. Freud's 'Original record of the case' is used to scrutinize his way of understanding and handling the transference with this patient. To a substantial extent transference as well as counter-transference was rather enacted than understood in this case, partly due to Freud's own personal and scientific interests and to his ambitions to use this case as a demonstration of his therapeutic approach. In order to show this, it is unavoidable to correct several blurry or even misleading passages of Strachey's translation. Findings from numerous workshops using 'comparative clinical methods' indicate that up till now we analysts - like Freud - have great difficulties in applying Freud's incredible insight that "a whole series of former psychic experiences comes alive not as the past but as the present relationship to the person of the physician" (Freud, 1905c [1901], p. 279/280, my translation).

Keywords: Clinical theory; Freud's practice; Rat Man; Strachey's translation; comparative methods; transference.

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• Reading Freud's "the Dynamics of Transference" one hundred years later. Almond R. Almond R. J Am Psychoanal Assoc. 2011 Dec;59(6):1129-56. doi: 10.1177/0003065111428982. J Am Psychoanal Assoc. 2011. PMID: 22180376
• Strachey's influence: a preliminary report. Ornston D. Ornston D. Int J Psychoanal. 1982;63(Pt 4):409-26. Int J Psychoanal. 1982. PMID: 7152805
• "Worthless female material": nursemaids and governesses in Freud's cases. Colombo D. Colombo D. J Am Psychoanal Assoc. 2010 Oct;58(5):835-59. doi: 10.1177/0003065110390212. Epub 2010 Dec 8. J Am Psychoanal Assoc. 2010. PMID: 21148131
• Returning to freud. Chessick RD. Chessick RD. J Am Acad Psychoanal Dyn Psychiatry. 2010 Fall;38(3):413-39. doi: 10.1521/jaap.2010.38.3.413. J Am Acad Psychoanal Dyn Psychiatry. 2010. PMID: 20849235 Review.
• The transference neurosis in Freud's writings. Reed GS. Reed GS. J Am Psychoanal Assoc. 1990;38(2):423-50. doi: 10.1177/000306519003800207. J Am Psychoanal Assoc. 1990. PMID: 2193976 Review.

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• Freudian Psychology

Case Studies of Sigmund Freud

Introduction to sigmund freud's case histories, including little hans, anna o and wolf man..

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Accounts of Freud ’s treatment of individual clients were key to his work, including the development of psychodynamic theory and stages of psychosexual development . Whilst the psychoanalyst’s use of case studies to support his ideas makes it difficult for us to prove or disprove Freud’s theories, they do provide fascinating insights into his day-to-day consultations with clients and offer clues as to the origins of his influential insights into how the human mind functions:

Little Hans

Perhaps the best known case study published by Freud was of Little Hans. Little Hans was the son of a friend and follower of Freud, music critic Max Graf. Graf’s son, Herbert, witnessed a tragic accident in which a horse carrying a heavily loaded cart collapsed in the street. Five year old Little Hans developed a fear of horses which led him to resist leaving the house for fear of seeing the animals. His father detailed his behavior in a series of letters to Freud and it was through these letters that the psychoanalyst directed the boy’s treatment. Indeed, the therapist and patient only met for a session on one occasion, but Freud published his case as a paper, Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (1909), in support of his theory of the Oedipus complex and his proposed stages of psychosexual development.

Freud Cases

• Rat Man: A Case of 'Obsessional Neurosis'
• Dora Case Study
• Inside the Mind of Daniel Schreber
• The Case of Little Hans

Little Hans’ father relayed to Freud his development and noted that he had begun to show an intense interest in the male genitals, which the therapist attributed to him experiencing the phallic stage of psychosexual development. During this stage, the erogenous zone (the area of the body that one focuses on to derive pleasure) switches to the genitals. At this stage, signs of an Oedipus complex may also be observed, whereby a child competes with their father to retain their position as the central focus of their mother’s affection. Freud believed that this was supported by a fantasy which Little Hans had described, in which a giraffe and another, crumpled, giraffe entered the room. When the boy took the latter from the first giraffe, it objected. Freud believed that the giraffes symbolised his parents - the crumpled giraffe represented his mother, whom he would share a bed with when his father was absent, and the first giraffe was symbolic of his father. Children may also develop castration anxiety resulting from a fear that the father will castrate them in order to remove the threat that they pose to the parents’ relationship.

The boy’s fear of horses, according to Freud, was caused by a displacement of fear for his father onto the animals, whose blinkers made them resemble the man wearing his glasses.

Freud believed that Little Hans’ fear of horses disappeared as his described fantasies that indicated the resolution of his castration anxiety and an acceptance of his love for his mother.

Read more about Little Hans here

Dr. Sergeï Pankejeff (1886-1979) was a client of Sigmund Freud , who referred to him as “Wolf Man” owing to a symbolic dream which he described to him. Freud detailed his sessions with Wolf Man, which commenced in February of 1910, in a 1918 paper entitled From the History of an Infantile Neurosis .

Wolf Man first saw Freud having suffered from deteriorating health since experiencing gonorrhea at the age of eighteen. He described how he was unable to pass bowel movements without the help of an enema, and felt as though he was separated from the rest of the world by a veil.

Freud persuaded Wolf Man to undergo treatment until a set date, after which their sessions should cease, in the belief that his patient would lower his resistance to the therapist’s investigation. Wolf Man agreed, and described to Freud the events of his childhood.

Initially, Wolf Man had been an agreeable child but became combative when his parents returned from their travels. He had been cared for by a new nanny whilst they had been absent and his parents blamed their relationship for his misbehavior. He also recalled developing a fear of wolves, and his sister would taunt him with an illustration in a picture book. However, Wolf Man’s fears extended towards other creatures, including beetles, caterpillars and butterflies. On one occasion, whilst he was pursuing a butterfly, fear overcame him and he was forced to end his pursuit. The man’s conflicting account suggested an early alternation between a phobia of, and taunting of, insects and animals such as horses.

Wolf Man’s unusual behavior was not limited to a fear of animals, and he developed a zealous religious worship routine, kissing every icon in the house before bed time, whilst experiencing blasphemous thoughts.

Wolf Man recalled a dream which had caused him some distress when he had awoken. In the dream, he was laid in bed when he looked out of the window and noticed six or seven white wolves sat in a tree outside. The wolves, which had tails that did not match their bodies, were watching him in his room.

Freud linked this nightmare to a story which Wolf Man’s grandfather had told him, in which a wolf named Reynard lost his tail whilst using it as bait for fishing. He believed that Wolf Man suffered from castration anxiety, which explained the fox-like tails of the wolves in the dream, and his fear of caterpillars, which he used to dissect. The man had also witnessed his father chopping a snake into pieces, which Freud believed had contributed to this anxiety.

Read more about Wolf Man here

The obsessive thoughts of Rat Man were discussed in 1909 paper Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis . Rat Man’s true identity is unclear, but many believe him to have been Ernst Lanzer (1978-1914), a law graduate of the University of Vienna.

Rat Man suffered from obsessive thoughts for years and underwent hydrotherapy before consulting Freud in 1907, having been impressed by the understanding that the psychoanalyst had professed in his published works. The subject of his thoughts would often involve a sense of anxiety that misfortune would affect a close friend or relative and he felt that he needed to carry out irrational behavior in order to prevent such a mishap from occurring. The irrationality of such thoughts was demonstrated by his fears for the death of his father, which continued even after his father had passed away.

Freud used techniques such as free association in order to uncover repressed memories . Rat Man’s recollection of past events also proved useful to Freud. He described one occasion during his military service, when a colleague revealed to him the morbid details of a torture method that he had learnt of. This form of torture involved placing a container of live rats onto a person and allowing the animals to escape the only way that they could - by burrowing through the victim.

This description stayed with Rat Man and he began to fear that this torture would be imposed upon a relative or friend. He convinced himself that the only way to prevent it would be to pay an officer whom he believed had collected a parcel for him from the post office. When he was prevented from satisfying this need, Rat Man began to feel increasingly anxious until his colleagues agreed to travel to the post office with him in order for the officer to be paid in the order that Rat Man felt was necessary.

Freud attributed Rat Man’s anxieties to a sense of guilt resulting from a repressed desire that he had experienced whilst younger to see women he knew unclothed. As our ego develops, our moral conscience leads us to repress the unreasonable or unacceptable desires of the id , and in the case of Rat Man, these repressed thoughts left behind “ ideational content ” in the conscious. As a result, the subject of anxiety and guilt that he felt whilst younger was replaced with fear of misfortune occurring when he was older.

Read more about Rat Man here

Other Influential Accounts

Whilst Freud saw many clients at his practise in Vienna, and cases such as Wolf Man, Rat Man and Dora are well documented, the psychoanalyst also applied psychodynamic theory to his interpretation of other patients, such Anna O, a client of his friend, Josef Breuer. The autobiographical account of Dr. Daniel Schreber also formed the basis of a 1911 paper by Freud detailing his interpretation of the man’s fantasies.

Anna O (a pseudonym for Austrian feminist Bertha Pappenheim) was a patient of Freud’s close friend, physician Josef Breuer. Although Freud never personally treated her (Anna’s story was relayed to him by Breuer), the woman’s case proved to be influential in the development of his psychodynamic theories. Freud and Breuer published a joint work on hysteria, Studies on Hysteria , in 1895, in which Anna O’s case was discussed.

Seeking treatment from Breur for hysteria in 1880, Anna O experienced paralysis in her right arm and leg, hydrophobia (an aversion to water) which left her unable to drink for long periods, along with involuntary eye movements, including a squint. She also found herself mixing languages whilst speaking to carers and would see hallucinations such as those of black snakes and skeletons, and would wake anxiously from her daytime sleep with cries of “tormenting, tormenting”.

During her talks with Breuer, Anna enjoyed telling fairytale-like stories, which would often involve sitting next to the bedside of a sick person. A dream that she recalled was also of a similar nature: she was sat next to the bed of an ill person in bed when a black snake approached the invalid. Anna wanted to protect the person from the snake but felt paralysed and was unable to warn off the snake.

Freud and Breuer considered the subject of this dream to be linked to an earlier experience. Prior to her own illness, Anna’s father had contracted tuberculosis and she had spent considerable lengths of time caring for him by his bedside. During this period, Anna had fallen ill, preventing her from accompanying her father in his final days and he passed away on April 1881. The trauma of caring for her father may have affected Anna, and Breuer believed that the paralysis she experienced in reality was a result of that which she had experienced in the dream. Furthermore, he linked her hydrophobia to another traumatic event some time previously, when she had witnessed a dog drinking from a glass of water that she was supposed to use. The revulsion she felt had stayed with her and manifested in a later aversion to water.

The conscious realisation of the causes behind her suffering, according to Breuer, helped Anna to make a recovery in 1882. She valued the “talking therapy” that he had provided, describing their sessions as “chimney sweeping”.

Read more about Anna O here

Dr. Daniel Schreber

Freud’s interpretation of client’s past experiences and dreams was not limited to the patients he saw at his Vienna clinic. German judge Dr. Daniel Schreber (1842-1911) wrote a book, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) - in which he detailed the fantasies that he experienced during the second of three periods of illness - whilst confined in the asylum of Sonnenstein Castle.

Upon reading the book, Freud offered his own thoughts on the causes of Schreber’s fantasies, which were published in his 1911 paper Notes upon an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides) .

Initially suffering whilst standing as a candidate in the 1884 Reichstag elections, Schreber had begun to experience hypochondria, for which he sought the help of Professor Paul Flechsig. After six months, treatment ended, but he returned to Flechsig in 1893, bothered again by hypochondria and now sleeplessness also. Schreber recalled thoughts during a half-asleep state in which he noted that “it really must be very nice to be a woman submitting to the act of copulation” (Freud, 1911). He would eventually turn against Professor Flechsig, accusing him of being a “soul murderer”, and thoughts of emasculation also developed into extended fantasies - Schreber convinced himself that he had been assigned a role of savior of the world, and that he must be turned in a woman in order for God to impregnate with him, creating a new generation which would repopulate the planet.

In his response to Schreber’s account, Freud focussed on the religious nature of the fantasies. Whilst Schreber was agnostic, his thoughts suggested religious doubts and what Freud described as “redeemer delusion” - a sense of being elevated to the role of redeemer of the world. The process of emasculation that Schreber felt was necessary was attributed by Freud to “homosexual impulses”, which the psychoanalyst suggests were directed towards the man’s father and brother. However, feelings of guilt for experiencing such desires led to them being repressed.

Freud also understood Schreber’s sense of resentment towards Flechsig in terms of transference - his feelings towards his brother had been subconsciously transferred to the professor, whilst those towards his father had been transferred to a godly figure.

Read more about Daniel Schreber here

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Perceptual Set In Psychology: Definition & Examples

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Perceptual set in psychology refers to a mental predisposition or readiness to perceive stimuli in a particular way based on previous experiences, expectations, beliefs, and context. It influences how we interpret and make sense of sensory information, shaping our perception and understanding of the world.

Perceptual set theory stresses the idea of perception as an active process involving selection, inference, and interpretation (known as top-down processing ).

The concept of perceptual set is important to the active process of perception.  Allport (1955) defined perceptual set as:

“A perceptual bias or predisposition or readiness to perceive particular features of a stimulus.”

Perceptual set is a tendency to perceive or notice some aspects of the available sensory data and ignore others.  According to Vernon, 1955 perceptual set works in two ways:

• The perceiver has certain expectations and focuses attention on particular aspects of the sensory data: This he calls a Selector”.
• The perceiver knows how to classify, understand and name selected data and what inferences to draw from it. This she calls an “Interpreter”.

It has been found that a number of variables, or factors, influence perceptual set, and set in turn influences perception. The factors include:

• Expectations • Emotion • Motivation • Culture

Expectation and Perceptual Set

(a) Bruner & Minturn (1955) illustrated how expectation could influence set by showing participants an ambiguous figure “13” set in the context of letters or numbers e.g.

The physical stimulus “13” is the same in each case but is perceived differently because of the influence of the context in which it appears. We EXPECT to see a letter in the context of other letters of the alphabet, whereas we EXPECT to see numbers in the context of other numbers.

(b) We may fail to notice printing/writing errors for the same reason. For example:

1. “The Cat Sat on the Map and Licked its Whiskers”.

(a) and (b) are examples of interaction between expectation and past experience.

(c) A study by Bugelski and Alampay (1961) using the “rat-man” ambiguous figure also demonstrated the importance of expectation in inducing set. Participants were shown either a series of animal pictures or neutral pictures prior to exposure to the ambiguous picture. They found participants were significantly more likely to perceive the ambiguous picture as a rat if they had had prior exposure to animal pictures.

Motivation / Emotion and Perceptual Set

Allport (1955) has distinguished 6 types of motivational-emotional influence on perception:

(i) bodily needs (e.g. physiological needs) (ii) reward and punishment (iii) emotional connotation (iv) individual values (v) personality (vi) the value of objects.

(a) Sandford (1936) deprived participants of food for varying lengths of time, up to 4 hours, and then showed them ambiguous pictures. Participants were more likely to interpret the pictures as something to do with food if they had been deprived of food for a longer period of time.

Similarly Gilchrist & Nesberg (1952), found participants who had gone without food for the longest periods were more likely to rate pictures of food as brighter. This effect did not occur with non-food pictures.

(b) A more recent study into the effect of emotion on perception was carried out by Kunst- Wilson & Zajonc (1980). Participants were repeatedly presented with geometric figures, but at levels of exposure too brief to permit recognition.

Then, on each of a series of test trials, participants were presented a pair of geometric forms, one of which had previously been presented and one of which was brand new.  For each pair, participants had to answer two questions: (a) Which of the 2 had previously been presented? ( A recognition test); and (b) Which of the two was most attractive? (A feeling test).

The hypothesis for this study was based on a well-known finding that the more we are exposed to a stimulus, the more familiar we become with it and the more we like it.  Results showed no discrimination on the recognition test – they were completely unable to tell old forms from new ones, but participants could discriminate on the feeling test, as they consistently favored old forms over new ones. Thus information that is unavailable for conscious recognition seems to be available to an unconscious system that is linked to affect and emotion.

Culture and Perceptual Set

Elephant drawing split-view and top-view perspective. The split elephant drawing was generally preferred by African children and adults .

(a) Deregowski (1972) investigated whether pictures are seen and understood in the same way in different cultures. His findings suggest that perceiving perspective in drawings is in fact a specific cultural skill, which is learned rather than automatic. He found people from several cultures prefer drawings which don”t show perspective, but instead are split so as to show both sides of an object at the same time.

In one study he found a fairly consistent preference among African children and adults for split-type drawings over perspective-drawings. Split type drawings show all the important features of an object which could not normally be seen at once from that perspective. Perspective drawings give just one view of an object. Deregowski argued that this split-style representation is universal and is found in European children before they are taught differently.

(b) Hudson (1960) noted difficulties among South African Bantu workers in interpreting depth cues in pictures. Such cues are important because they convey information about the spatial relationships among the objects in pictures. A person using depth cues will extract a different meaning from a picture than a person not using such cues.

Hudson tested pictorial depth perception by showing participants a picture like the one below. A correct interpretation is that the hunter is trying to spear the antelope, which is nearer to him than the elephant. An incorrect interpretation is that the elephant is nearer and about to be speared. The picture contains two depth cues: overlapping objects and known size of objects. Questions were asked in the participants native language such as:

What do you see? Which is nearer, the antelope or the elephant? What is the man doing?

The results indicted that both children and adults found it difficult to perceive depth in the pictures.

The cross-cultural studies seem to indicate that history and culture play an important part in how we perceive our environment. Perceptual set is concerned with the active nature of perceptual processes and clearly there may be a difference cross-culturally in the kinds of factors that affect perceptual set and the nature of the effect.

Allport, F. H. (1955). Theories of perception and the concept of structure . New York: Wiley.

Bruner, J. S. and Minturn, A.L. (1955). Perceptual identification and perceptual organisation, Journal of General Psychology 53: 21-8.

Bugelski, B. R., & Alampay, D. A., (1961). The role of frequency in developing perceptual sets. Canadian Journal of Psychology , 15, 205-211.

Deregowski, J. B., Muldrow, E. S. & Muldrow, W. F. (1972). Pictorial recognition in a remote Ethiopian population. Perception , 1, 417-425.

Gilchrist, J. C.; Nesberg, Lloyd S. (1952). Need and perceptual change in need-related objects. Journal of Experimental Psychology , Vol 44(6).

Hudson, W. (1960). Pictorial depth perception in sub-cultural groups in Africa. Journal of Social Psychology , 52, 183-208.

Kunst- Wilson, W. R., & Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Affective discrimination of stimuli that cannot be recognised. Science , Vol 207, 557-558.

Necker, L. (1832). LXI. Observations on some remarkable optical phenomena seen in Switzerland; and on an optical phenomenon which occurs on viewing a figure of a crystal or geometrical solid . The London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 1 (5), 329-337.

Sanford, R. N. (1936). The effect of abstinence from food upon imaginal processes: a preliminary experiment. Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied , 2, 129-136.

Vernon, M. D. (1955). The functions of schemata in perceiving. Psychological Review , Vol 62(3).

Why people should be skeptical when evaluating the accuracy of their perceptual set?

People should be skeptical when evaluating the accuracy of their perceptual set because it can lead to biased and subjective interpretations of reality. It can limit our ability to consider alternative perspectives or recognize new information that challenges our beliefs. Awareness of our perceptual sets and actively questioning them allows for more open-mindedness, critical thinking, and a more accurate understanding of the world.

Mind and Society

A-level psychology and sociology, tag archives: ratman, does previous experience influence our perception.

Introduction

The experiment took place in order to investigate the effects of previous events on perception, in this case it was seeing a picture which was either a group of animals or a group of people and then later when shown a picture participants had to describe what they had perceived. The null hypothesis for this experiment is that there will be no correlation between the pictures that the participants were originally given and the way in which they perceived the second image. The alternative hypothesis however is that there will be a difference depending on which images were seen by the participants. The experiment was used to investigate various theories about perception such as that from Vernon 1955 who described the ‘Perceptual Set’ and said that it worked in two ways.  The first is where the perceiver has certain expectations, in this case due to the image already seen and therefore will focus their attention on particular aspects of sensory data. He calls this the selector. The second part is where the perceiver knows how to classify name and interpret certain data and therefore know what to draw from it, he calls this the perceiver.  The main aim of this experiment however is to replicate the study of perception conducted by Bugelski and Alampay who investigated the importance of expectation in the perceptual set, they found that those who had previously been shown images of animals were more likely to see the stimulus as being a rat because they had preconceived expectations. The other aim is to understand the conventions for writing psychological investigations using a simple experiment in order to practice this.

In order to test this a sample involving the whole of the psychology class was taken making it an opportunity sample, some of the class were given stimulus cards depicting animals where the rest had cards with people on. This therefore used the experimental design of independent groups because there were two groups with different stimuli.  The actual picture was then put upon the board and each participant was asked to write down what they had seen. In this case it was likely to be either a man or a rat depending on the stimulus they have previously been given. The results were then interpreted using chi square which is a statistical test that allows accuracy of results to be seen.

This is the formula for chi squared:

Here is an example of the stimuli given:

Participants were able to give consent because it was made clear that they didn’t have to participate and could remain anonymous if necessary. On the other hand informed consent could not be given because this would affect the results of the experiment as demand characteristics could be displayed making them less reliable. A debrief was carried out however which explained why the experiment had taken place meaning the experiment was fairly ethical due to these measures.

Here is a table of the raw results seen in the experiment:

Here is the table of the raw results inputted into the chi squared equation:

The results could be described using Gregory’s theory of indirect perception which states that people base their perceptions on prior knowledge and past experiences hence why the participants used their previous knowledge of the stimulus to base their perception upon. Gregory says that perception occurs as a result of hypothesis testing where the brain attempts to guess and process the image based on information previously stored in long-term memory. Here in these results however there appears to have been a fault in the perception which he would explain to be due to a faulty hypothesis hence the differing perceptions although there is still a weak correlation. So to conclude, although using chi squared the results appear to be insignificant, we can see results which begin to prove the alternative hypothesis that perception is dependent upon the stimulus seen but they are not consistent enough to provide a reliable conclusion.

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