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In this volume concerning Freud's case history of the Rat Man, Mahony continues his work of dissecting Freud's personality as well as his work from both the literary and psychoanalytic points of view. Mahony is a professor of English at the University of Montreal, which is, incidentally, a French-speaking university, and one wonders about the influence of that fact on the writer's views. At any rate, psychoanalysis continues to incur a mounting debt to the contributions of professors at Canadian universities, with Phyllis Grosskurth, an English professor at the University of Toronto, contributing her distinguished and voluminous study of Melanie Klein, and Paul Roazen, a political scientist at York University, giving us his more widely ranging views of psychoanalytic personalities.
One recognizes the validity of Mahony's statement that “material amassed on Freud is the most precise and penetrating body of data that exists on the life of any individual in history” (p. xiii), and one may add, the torrent of studies still to come will also be monumental. But one must wonder at his opinion that “curiously, there has never been any comprehensive attempt to study Freud's case histories of his patients” (p. xiii), particularly because he quotes the work of Kanzer and Glenn, editors of Freud and His Patients, as well as many other such investigations. However, the examination of the Rat Man history by Mahony is informative in some new ways, e.g., his inspection of original documents affords us much hitherto unknown factual information, establishing even the patient's actual identity.
Mahony finds so many lacunae in Freud's presentation of his work that one is surprised to read that he ends up with so many complimentary evaluations of Freud's effort. Thus we hear that “We do not … come across any indication of resolution of the Rat Man's transference neurosis, but we rather find abounding evidence against Freud's claim that he brought about a ‘complete restoration’ of his pati