Letters to the Editor

DEAR SIR,

I am writing in regard to an error which appears in the paper by David Rosenfeld, 'The handling of resistances in adult patients', Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 61:71–83, 1980.

Rosenfeld cites, correctly, Freud's note of 11 October, in which Freud notes that on the previous day he had asked the patient to bring a photograph of the lady with him (p. 77).

After this citation, Rosenfeld goes on to make some comments about the first two sessions of the analysis which relate obviously to the sessions reported on pages 159–170 of the case report (S.E. 10.). He comments explicitly on the story of the rat torture, and speculates about the patient's fear of anal penetration by Freud.

Then, astonishingly (p. 78), Rosenfeld states that Freud had evoked this fear by asking the patient to bring a photograph of the lady 'in the course of the second session' (my italics). Apparently, Rosenfeld has misunderstood the sequence of the notes. In fact, Freud asked for the photograph in the eighth session.

The introductory session with the patient was on 1 October (S.E. 10, p. 254). The analysis began the next day, and the next seven sessions are reported in Freud's case report, continuing to page 186. The Original Record, as Strachey designates it, starts with the eighth session on 10 October. 11 October is the second session of the original record but the ninth session of the analysis. Rosenfeld seems to think that this second session of the original record consists of Freud's notes for the second session of the analysis, though, at that, it would have been the first session in which he asked for the photograph. In any case, Rosenfeld's suggestion that the story of the rat torture was linked with Freud's request for the photograph is baseless.

While the sequence of sessions is evident in Strachey's translation, the entire, unabridged original record has now been published by Hawelka (L'Homme Aux Rats, 1974, Presses Universitaires de France). The sequence I have described is confi