Rat Man
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For the Italian comic book character, see Rat-Man (comics)
"Rat Man" was the nickname given by Sigmund Freud to the patient whose 'case history' was published as Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose ['Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis'] (1909). The nickname derives from the fact that one of the patient's symptoms was an obsessive fantasy concerning two people close to him, in which a pot of rats was fastened to their buttocks to gnaw into the anus.
To protect the anonymity of patients, psychoanalytic case-studies would usually withhold or disguise the names of the individuals concerned ('Anna O'; 'Little Hans'; 'Wolf Man', etc). Recent researchers have decided that the 'Rat Man' was in fact Ernst Lanzer[citation needed] (1878-1914) -- though many other sources maintain that the man's name was Paul Lorenz[citation needed].
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[edit] 'Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional 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 presented with obsessional thoughts and with behaviors which he felt compelled to carry out. The case received its name from a torture he had heard about from a military officer, where rats would eat their way into the anus of the victim. The patient then felt a compulsion to imagine that this fate was befalling two people dear to him, specifically his fiancée and his father. The irrational and compulsive nature of this obsession is revealed by the fact that the man had the greatest regard for his fiancée and that his revered father had actually been dead for some years. Freud theorized that these compulsive ideas and similar thoughts were produced by conflicts consisting of the combination of loving and aggressive impulses relating to the people concerned.
The Rat-man 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.
[edit] Criticism of Freud's interpretation
The only known case in which Freud's notes survive is that of Ernst Lanzer, the Rat Man. Freud treated him for obsessions, particularly the dread that something terrible would happen to his father and his girlfriend. His fear of rats, Freud showed through elaborate interpretations, was based on disguised homosexual 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. But Patrick Mahony, a psychoanalyst and professor of English at the University of Montreal, has discovered several discrepancies between Freud's own case notes and his published narrative of the treatment. His findings are in Freud and the Rat Man, published in 1986 by the Yale University Press. Dr. Mahony said Freud seems to have twisted the actual course of the case a bit to better support his theoretical points. He also said Freud misrepresented some of the facts to make his deductive powers seem all the more impressive. For example, Freud said he had guessed the name of the Rat Man's girlfriend, Gisela, from an anagram, Glejisamen, that 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.[1]
