Rat Man


"Rat Man" was the nickname given by Sigmund Freud to a patient whose "case history" was published as Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose . This was the second of six case histories that Freud published, and the first in which he claimed that the patient had been cured by psychoanalysis.
The nickname derives from the fact that among the patient's many compulsions was an obsession with nightmarish fantasies about rats.
To protect the anonymity of patients, psychoanalytic case studies usually withheld or disguised the names of the individuals concerned. Recent researchers have decided that the "Rat Man" was in fact a clever lawyer named Ernst Lanzer —though many other sources maintain that the man's name was Paul Lorenz.

History of the analysis

Lanzer first came to Freud in October 1907 complaining of obsessive fears and compulsive impulses. Freud treated his patient for a little over three months on a regular daily basis. The treatment was irregular for the next three months and sporadic, at best, after that.
Lanzer's principal fear was that something terrible was going to happen to his father and a female friend. His fear had grown out of an account he heard from a fellow army officer concerning a Chinese torture method in which a large pot containing a live rat was strapped to the buttocks of the victim, and the rat, encouraged by a red-hot poker, would gnaw its way out through the victim's anus.
Lanzer claimed that he fantasized about murder and suicide, and he developed a number of compulsive irrational behavior patterns. For example, he mentioned his habit of opening the door to his flat between 12 midnight and 1:00 A.M., apparently so that his father's ghost could enter. Lanzer would then stare at his penis, sometimes using a mirror.
Freud encouraged Lanzer to discuss details of his sex life and focused on a number of verbal associations with the word "Ratten". According to Freud's analysis, Lanzer unconsciously identified himself with rats: that is, Lanzer was unconsciously fantasizing that he – a rat and a biter – was having anal intercourse with his father and with his lady friend.
Lanzer was verbally clever and introduced Freud to Nietzsche's phrase "'I did this,' says my Memory. 'I cannot have done this,' says my Pride, and remains inexorable. In the end – Memory yields." Freud retold the saying more than once, and it was used by later therapists such as Fritz Perls.
Lanzer broke off his analysis with Freud after a relatively brief period and well before his transference had been fully resolved. Just after Freud had completed the written version of the case history in October 1909, he confessed to Jung that his patient was having ongoing problems. Lanzer was killed in World War I, and later researchers were unable to interview him.

Legacy

built his early structuralist theory around the Rat Man case, in particular the polarity of father–rich wife/son–poor wife as an intergenerational force creating the individual neurosis.
Freud's late note upon the Rat Man's acute sense of smell would later be developed into his theory of the process of civilisation and organic repression.

Criticism of Freud

The only known case in which Freud's notes survive is that of Ernst Lanzer, the Rat-Man, where they exist for the first third of the treatment. Freud treated him for obsessions, particularly the dread that something terrible would happen to his father and his fiancée. His fear of rats, Freud concluded after elaborate interpretations, was based on disguised anal erotic fantasies. Mr. Stadlen tracked down relatives of Mr. Lanzer who said the account handed down by the family was that Freud had helped him overcome shyness so that he could marry.
Peter Gay concluded in that "apart from a handful of interesting deviations, the case history Freud published generally followed the process notes he made every night". Patrick Mahony, a psychoanalyst and professor of English at the University of Montreal, has highlighted such discrepancies in his detailed study Freud and the Rat Man, published in 1986 by the Yale University Press.
Dr. Mahony said Freud seems to have consistently implied that the case lasted longer than it actually did. He also said Freud claimed in a lecture to be able to guess the name of the Rat Man's girlfriend, Gisela, from an anagram, Glejisamen, which the patient had invented. Actually, the notes show Freud had learned her name first, and then used it to deduce the meaning of the anagram, although in the actual case-study Freud merely states that "when he told it to me, I could not help noticing that the word was in fact an anagram of the name of his lady".
Critics have objected to Freud's downplaying of the role of the Rat Man's mother, and for several deviations on his part from what later became standard psychoanalytic practice.

Efficacy of the treatment

Mahoney accepted that Freud obtained a degree of success in restoring his patient to functional life, though he considered Freud exaggerated the extent of this in his case-study. Others have suggested that by concentrating on building rapport with his patient, at the expense of analyzing the negative transference, Freud merely achieved a temporary transference cure. Lacan for his part concluded that although he did not "regard the Rat Man as a case that Freud cured", in it "Freud made the fundamental discoveries, which we are still living off, concerning the dynamics and structure of obsessional neurosis".
In a letter Freud wrote to Jung, shortly after publication of the case study, he claimed of the Rat Man that "he is facing life with courage and ability. The one point that still gives him trouble has shown up clearly in my conversations with this intelligent and grateful man" – a not insignificant reservation. But while Freud in the case-history had certainly claimed that "the patient's rat delirium had disappeared", he had also pointed out the limited time and depth of the analysis: "The patient recovered, and his ordinary life began to assert its claims...which were incompatible with a continuation of the treatment".
As the average length of time expected of an analysis increased from months to years over the 20th century, so too the success of the Rat Man's case has perhaps come to resemble rather the symptomatic relief of brief psychotherapy or focal psychotherapy, more than the achievement of a full psychoanalysis.