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It is axiomatic that every psychoanalyst has a transference to Freud, but the role of that transference in our reading and interpretation of Freud is rarely recognized. Awareness of that transference pervades Freud and the Rat Man. Indeed, the author hopes that we will eventually be able to compare divergent readings of Freud, the French and the Anglo-American for example, from a semiotic point of view, thereby disengaging more of Freud's substance from our inevitable personal and institutional biases. If that eventuality still seems distant, Mahony has nevertheless written a stimulating book and one which ought to encourage us to be more aware of the problem.
A photocopy of Freud's original record of the case, easily accessible in the Library of Congress, led Mahony to discover the identity of the Rat Man. This knowledge allowed him to uncover primary sources in Vienna with which to enlarge our picture of the famous patient's family, milieu, and subsequent life. He also pursued all mentions of the case in Freud's correspondence, as well as in the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, where he discovered two new references to the patient.
In the process of reading the secondary literature on Freud's case, Mahony realized that no one had compared the original record of the case—Strachey does not include all of it—with the published record, so he set about studying Freud's changes and omissions. That careful comparison, together with his extra-textual research, has led him to several interesting conclusions. Perhaps