In the Rat Man, Freud did not directly stress the narcissistic factor. However, the importance of narcissistic injury in the Rat Man is indirectly emphasized by Freud in his reference to the Rat Man's disappointment in a

friend who had previously 'raised his self-esteem to an extraordinary degree', as 'the first great blow in his life'. The author describes a case where he believes lack of narcissistic investment in the mother, who was stern and pedantic, led the woman patient to an obsessional defense, while investment in an early erotic closeness to her father resulted in a perversion. He sees the ego as decathected narcissistically in obsessional neurosis and caught between a sadistic superego and archaic impulses. Increasingly overwhelmed, it suffers exclusion and carries out orders compulsively, experiencing them as a foreign body.