Freud's endeavour to create a clinical method that should fit his partially contradictory aims led to a clinical situation pervaded by inconsistencies as an ambiguity surrounding the position of the analyst. In the paper the significance of the analyst's asymmetric position is explored. The assumption is that the ambiguity of the analyst's asymmetric position causes an uncertainty in the analysand that stirs up fundamental desires and contributes to the potentiality of psychoanalysis. By examining the case of the Rat Man we have conditions to study Freud's technique, discern how the complex interaction in analysis destabilizes Freud's notion of the analyst's and the patient's fixed positions. Freud came to the conclusion that the structure of the clinical situation seduces the analysand into an idealization.

Freud structured the clinical situation as a correspondence to the original situation that exists between a small child seeking relief and a parent. Laplanche's analogy considers the child - parent relation, in all its dissymmetry, as representing a fundamental anthropological situation and the ambiguity of the asymmetric position is a crucial element of the process that provokes and opens up the infantile trauma in the psychoanalytic situation. The theoretical model is applied on a clinical vignette.