Rat Man

Legacy

Jacques Lacan built his early structuralist theory around the Rat Man case, in particular the polarity of father-rich wife/son-poor wife as an intergenerational force creating the individual neurosis.

The Rat Man himself cited Nietzsche to Freud to the effect that "'I did this,' says my Memory. 'I cannot have done this,' says my Pride, and remains inexorable. In the end – Memory yields". Freud would retell the saying more than once, and it would be taken up by later therapists such as Fritz Perls.

Freud's late note upon the Rat Man's acute sense of smell would later be developed into his theory of the process of civilisation and organic repression.

Criticism of Freud

The only known case in which Freud's notes survive is that of Ernst Lanzer, the Rat-Man, where they exist for the first third of the treatment. Freud treated him for obsessions, particularly the dread that something terrible would happen to his father and his fiancee. His fear of rats, Freud showed through elaborate interpretations, was based on disguised anal erotic fantasies. Mr. Stadlen tracked down relatives of Mr. Lanzer who said the account handed down by the family was that Freud had helped him overcome shyness so that he could marry.

Peter Gay concluded that "apart from a handful of interesting deviations, the case history Freud published generally followed the process notes he made every night". Patrick Mahony, a psychoanalyst and professor of English at the University of Montreal, has highlighted such discrepancies in his detailed study, Freud and the Rat Man, published in 1986 by the Yale University Press.

Dr. Mahony said Freud seems to have consistently implied that the case lasted longer than it actually did. He also said Freud claimed in a lecture to be able to guess the name of the Rat Man's girlfriend, Gisela, from an anagram, Glejisamen, which the patient had invented. Actually, the notes show Freud had learned her name first, and then used it to deduce the meaning of the anagram, although in the actual case-study Freud merely states that "when he told it to me, I could not help noticing that the word was in fact an anagram of the name of his lady".

Critics have also objected to Freud's downplaying of the role of the Rat Man's mother, and for several deviations on his part from what would later become standard psychoanalytic practice.

Efficacy of the treatment

Mahoney accepted that Freud obtained a degree of success in restoring his patient to functional life, though he considered Freud exaggerated the extent of this in his case-study. 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. Lacan for his part concluded that although he did not "regard the Rat Man as a case that Freud cured", in it "Freud made the fundamental discoveries, which we are still living off, concerning the dynamics and structure of obsessional neurosis".

In a letter Freud himself wrote to Jung, shortly after publication of the case study, he claimed of the Rat Man that "he is facing life with courage and ability. The one point that still gives him trouble (father-complex and transference) has shown up clearly in my conversations with this intelligent and grateful man" – a not insignificant reservation. But while Freud in the case-history had certainly claimed that "the patient's rat delirium had disappeared", he had also pointed out the limited time and depth of the analysis: "The patient recovered, and his ordinary life began to assert its claims...which were incompatible with a continuation of the treatment".

As the average length of time expected of an analysis increased from months to years over the 20th century, so too the success of the Rat Man's case has perhaps come to resemble rather the symptomatic relief of brief psychotherapy or focal psychotherapy, more than the achievement of a full psychoanalysis.