Chapter VI. The Rat Man (Obsessional Neurosis)

The case of the Rat Man seems to have taken place in 1907, which means that it started before the treatment of Little Hans by his father under Freud's supervision. The Rat Man was in treatment for some eleven months before he himself broke it off, feeling well, able to face his exams, and to get on with his life. Freud reports in a footnote later that, like so many young men of promise, he died in the First World War. Not only is the paper itself of great interest, but we have also the extraordinary luck to have Freud's notes for the first four months, the notes that he made in the evening after he had finished his day's work. They are fascinating, and give us probably the most accurate picture that we have of Freud actually at work in his consulting room. Therefore we can attempt to draw some inferences from these notes with regard to Freud's technique, and to compare them with the technical papers that begin to appear some three or four years later.

We are perhaps struck by the way in which he starts the treatment, and in the first few sessions seems to give the patient a theoretical exposition of the method of psycho-analysis and its therapeutic rationale. Most striking perhaps is the contrast with the Dora case, for we see here that Freud was able to follow his patient almost to the exclusion of his seizing the initiative in pursuit of his own enquiries. This may be due partly to the fact that the material did tend to bubble forth from the Rat Man, and that the resistances fairly quickly turned into transference resistances, in which the patient described to Freud under great stress and distress, the phantasies he had of a sadistic and sexual nature toward him, toward his daughter, toward his mother, toward his family generally.

One notices the calmness with which Freud dealt with these transference manifestations; perhaps because of his theoretical orientation to them; viewing them, as he wrote about transferences, as new editions or re-editions of past events an