An Analyst's Uncertain Knowledge: The Case of a Suspected Rapist

There are no facts, only interpretations.

The most comprehensive function of psychoanalysis is the provision of a revolutionary perspective from which to view human history. The psychoanalyst-as-historian claims that few who have ever lived possessed an enlightened understanding of their existence. In the past, a person's recognition of the forces influential in his life-story was parochial—politically shaped by the societal myths sanctioned by those who ruled. The Freudian revolution afforded a radical change in how history could be understood. It promised (Freud, 1914) that each person, persistently curious about his own mental life, is in a position to be his own best historian, provided that he examines his history with a professional guide trained in the pursuit of psychological truth.

A patient in his first few sessions with me reported a series of dreams in which he attempted to rape women. I was alarmed because certain of the details in the dreams corresponded to information I was given by a police officer, whom I also was treating at that time, about a serial rapist then on the loose. Referred to as the “Beltway Rapist” by the local media, for the previous year-and-a-half, he had used a police light on his car to stop female motorists traveling alone at night on the highway, and assault them. I noticed that the patient's car, parked outside of my office during sessions, fit the description of the car (minus police light) reported in the media as that of the perpetrator. Although the model was a popular one, the similarities in the dreams and of the car with that of the Beltway Rapist were sufficient to suggest the possibility that my patient's reports were not dreams but fragments of actual events that my patient either had intentionally presented in camouflaged version or from partial amnesia.

It is one sort of matter to be uncertain about the information reported by a psychoneurotic, whose major problem is his inability to translate his w