Wordly Powers: A Political Reading of the Rat Man

This essay presents a political reading of one of Freud's case histories, the “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” better known as the case of the Rat Man (Freud 1909, 155-249; references to the Rat Man case will be indicated hereafter by page number only). The reading of the Rat Man suggested here is political in that it focuses on the dynamics of domination and the positions of authority in which Freud and his patient placed themselves in relation to one another. It explores the dialectics of control and compliance, subjugation and submission, as they are described by Freud in reference to both the therapeutic setting and the Rat Man's mind. Furthermore, it highlights fantasies and anxieties—again, as they emerge in Freud's case report—that involve influence and omnipotence. In other words, the reading of the Rat Man case proposed here is labeled political since it focuses on manifestations and representations of power in Freud's text. A political reading of this kind complements the economic reading of the case introduced by Lacan in his essay, “The Individual Myth of the Neurotic, or ‘Poetry and Truth’ in Neurosis,” on which John Forrester substantially elaborated and expanded in Truth Games: Lies, Money and Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1979; Forrester 1997, 110-171). Both Lacan and Forrester point to the pivotal role that fantasies and images of money, economic circulation, wealth and poverty, and paid and unpaid debts play throughout the Rat Man case. Such readings differ significantly from the psychoanalytic critique of the Rat Man's case, which tends to focus on questions of transference and countertransference, anality, hidden homosexuality and Freud's deviations from the