An Identity for the Rat Man

The unfortunate (and unfortunately named) Rat Man has provided a great variety of people with occasions for new skills, not the least of which were Freud's own. Indeed, now that much of the original record of the case has been published, he has even become the basis for a BBC film! Long before the film, however, psychoanalytic theorists had begun testing post-1909 concepts against this early clinical material.

Kanzer (1952), for example, has analysed the way how, in the transference, Freud was drawn into the patient's aggressive fantasies, and how the very act of analytic work became involved in the patient's neurotic patterns. Sherwood (1969) studied both the data of the case and Freud's ways of explaining them as prototypes of psychoanalytic thinking.

Zetzel (1966) provided a modern evaluation of the patient and the treatment in the light of what we now know about development and the interferences with it that lead to pathology. She sees as a most significant feature of the case an oedipal triangle composed of himself, his father and his sister Katherine, who died at the height of his infantile neurosis. The patient used then and at the time of treatment denial as his major way of dealing (or failing to deal) with loss. Finally, in evaluating the patient after treatment, she remarks, 'the unresolved ambivalence surrounding his relationship with his mother may have remained a potential Achilles heel'. This is the most striking instance of modern psychoanalytic concepts filling in consciously gaps Freud dealt with intuitively: he had not understood in 1909 the importance of early object relations in 'what was then the prehistoric period of early infancy'. Yet he managed to deal spontaneously with some of these issues by actions towards the patient, which appear in the original record although he had no theory with which to talk about them in the published case. There the father was seen as the important real object and 'the patient's mother … was only mentio