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November 16, 1964. THE RAT AND THE TOOTH: A STUDY OF THE CENTRAL CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF OVERSTIMULATION. Leonard Shengold, M.D.
Patients who have been overstimulated as children (seduced and beaten) present certain similar characteristics as a result of a need simultaneously to repeat and ward off past traumatic experiences. They tend to become involved in sadistic experiences of overstimulation both as tormentor and as victim. Much of the feeling evoked by these experiences is cannibalistic: it involves a particular kind of rage in which the person, beside himself with overexcitement, is both subject and object with wishes to bite and destroy. In analysis these wishes are often expressed in associations to the rat, whose teeth, invasiveness, and destructiveness are the sources of its power over man's imagination. Freud's classic study of the Rat Man is reviewed, as well as the story of the rat torture in Mirbeau's Torture Garden (which Shengold believes may be the literary source of the tale that obsessed the Rat Man).
The destructive impulses and the terror of annihilation associated with the overstimulated state of the child are defended against by massive, crippling means such as an intense isolation from all feelings, a need to lie to oneself in order not to consummate the knowledge of the terrible past. The superego can be shattered by the simultaneous need to repeat the seductions of the past and the deep unconscious need to punish the self and spare the parent. This is seen especially in relation to the seduction of children by psychotic parents where the traumatic events have to be denied as the very parent who inflicted the damage is turned to for rescue.