Norman Holland and Jacques Lacan have studied Freud's case of the Rat Man. Both attempted a reformulation of the oedipus complex theory: Holland emphasized a scientific perspective, and Lacan approached the material in literary-philosophical terms. Blades suggests that both Holland and Lacan failed to examine the process of transference in the case, and thus dealt with the Rat Man more as a

literary work than an actual analytic case. Blades emphasizes three aspects of the transference: the meaning of debt for the Rat Man; his perception of Freud as "the cruel captain"; and the feeling resulting when the analyst did not answer questions directly but subjected their meaning to analytic scrutiny. A study of transference-countertransference in the recorded case material might provide us with material overlooked in the work of Holland and Lacan.