The ‘Rat Man’ from the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume X (1909) Pages 151 to 318
The more I thought about this text the more complex the task of writing about it became. How to approach it? On face value? As a case study of a man whose obsessional thoughts distressed him and drove him to seek help? Or as a window into a claustrophobic fin de siècle Vienna via that most modern manifestation of it’s continuing fascination with itself, the consulting room of a literally pre-eminent psychoanalyst. (Freud was little-known at this time and was intent on establishing the efficacy of his technique and theories through published accounts of successful treatments).
Just as contemporary historians would be more likely to view Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a primary source account of Gibbon and a critique of the C18th rather than a serious history of the Roman Empire so it is difficult not to consider Freud’s account as more revealing of himself and the historicized moment of his being than as a translation and resolution of the commonplace thoughts of a young man. Without wishing to dismiss or denigrate Lanzer’s distress Freud’s classification of the case as ‘moderately severe on account of its longevity, the injuriousness of its effects and the patient’s own view of it’ appears somewhat excessive. There’s a vast difference between ‘the compulsion to imagine’ and the compulsion to act. Lanzer physically harmed nobody, neither his loved ones nor himself.
Freud saw Ernst Lanzer, the ‘Rat Man’, for about a year though the extant notes only cover sessions from 10th October 1907 to 20th January 1908. His published account covers the whole period. He regarded the treatment as a success. Simply, Lanzer presented with obsessional thoughts and with behaviours which he felt compelled to carry out (though, of course, he didn’t, other than in an internalized, non-injurious manner – even his compulsive train journeys always find him in some hospitable abode, i.e. he’s never without food and shelter). The case received its name from the torture he had heard about from a military officer, where rats would eat their way into the anus of the victim. The patient then ‘felt a compulsion to imagine that this fate was befalling two people dear to him’, namely his father and his fiancée, the first who he ‘revered’ and the second who he ‘loved’.
He told Freud that the rat torture was simply the latest example of these obsessive thoughts, fears and compulsive impulses which had been with him since childhood but had manifested with particular intensity in the last four years (his father had died ‘several years ago… many years ago’ according to Freud’s text).
The rat torture in various forms had been a popular pantomime horror in the public domain since roman times and some authors have suggested that Lanzer (or his officer) more likely took the account from Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau (publ 1899 and a best seller).
However, despite the almost comic absurdity of some of the sessions esp. ‘The great Obsessive Fear’, 165 – 167, when he reveals his reason for coming to Freud with great theatricality –
‘Here the patient broke off, got up from the sofa, and begged me to spare him the recital of the details’. Freud assured him he’d help him all he could by guessing what was unspeakable for Lanzer from ‘any hints he gave me’. Hence, the following unintentionally comic conversation.
“ ‘Perhaps, impalement?’_’No, not that; … almost inaudible, ‘A pot was upturned upon his buttocks…some rats were put into it…and they…’_he had again got up, and was showing every sign of horror and resistance_’… bored their way in_…’
‘_Into his anus’, I helped him out.”
Despite the above and despite the text reading like a disguised seduction narrative of an innocent maid by a man with authority (doctor or priest) from the annals of Victorian pornography… something still happens in the consulting room that is extremely exciting and, outside the confession box with its familiar template of Catholicism through which all utterances must be mediated, unique in its newness.
Freud has given Lanzer permission to speak, insisted he say whatever comes into his head. Such license didn’t even exist in theatre in 1907, or music. Mahler, Ibsen, even Strindberg, were still in thrall to the long twilight of Romanticism. Though all were struggling to break through, an uneasy order still prevailed.
Whether the storm of recollection or invention (Jung believed the neurosis obsession/compulsion clothed itself in the plausible rags of a story simply to get through - because its energy is outside the empire of speech and the only way it can be allowed safe passage through the psyche is clothed in something familiar… something understandable.) something exciting is happening in the room.
Despite Freud’s insecurity marked by his claimed compensatory percipience, his Sherlock Holmes-like ability to unravel motives, impulses, clues and reasons from the fecund outpourings of his ‘patient’ (the claim of guessing the girlfriend’s name from lanzer’s anagrammatic prayer, contradicted by his own notes) the hospitality extended to Lanzer’s every thought is something new. And something about Freud’s empathy with the outsider encourages this process.
Lanzer brings everything, talks of copulating with his sister buttock to buttock using his stool as a surrogate cock. Freud earnestly listens, respectfully dissects and suggests. He’s interested and he’s curious.
One point of view would be that as an account of an episode of therapy it simply confirms Lacan’s observation that ‘we are not cured because we ‘remember’ – we ‘remember’ because we are cured’. i.e. when ‘Rat Man’ turns up for treatment and engages, that’s the cure; not Freud’s interpretations. They’re merely the theatre that occupies Freud’s desire for worldly success and recognition enough to allow him to be present for Lanzer to speak clear.
To continue in this vein would be to say that, ironically, Freud did ‘cure’ him but not in the way he believed or offered. Freud is like a popular medium who engages in fraudulent practice because they are too frightened to trust their gifts and surrender to posterity. Hence the tangled skein of his legacy.
According to his family Lanzer simply went to Freud “to overcome his shyness so he could marry”… this from a recent book that highlights discrepancies between Freud’s notes and his published account of the sessions (with the implication that Freud ‘spun’ his notes to cast his theories and his own deductive abilities in a better light). Lanzer, incidentally, died amongst the rat-infested trenches of the Western Front in the 1st World War in 1914, seven years after his year with Freud.
What is most interesting for me (and I’ve oscillated from various positions in relation to this matter including that stated above – and suspect I’ll continue to do so) is the nature of the consulting room and the space it provides within a caste ridden Viennese society at once parochial, urbane and insecure. Here is a space (created by Freud) where it is ostensibly possible to say whatever one wants, to shout out all the repressed genii’s and acknowledge the exiled angels. Here is a place where darkness can become visible in the daylight in a respectable suburb, not in the nocturnal world of cafes and brothels where such utterances would be de rigueur. It’s a Freeport, a place where the constraints of a confined self-consciously fin de siècle society can be removed. A dangerous, intoxicating place requiring caution in how its activities are reported to the outside world.
In defence of Freud, accusations of encouragement of moral dissolution and lawlessness are never far behind alongside quackery, chicanery and fraud - the rest of the lexicon whereby we ‘deliver ourselves from evil’ and of course ‘temptation’. Hence he has to be mindful and protect himself and his insights.
The accusation of psychoanalysis encouraging or legitimizing bad behaviour – giving license and permission to our basest impulses - is a serious one, hence, in an unconscious and conscious critique of this Freud and his colleagues must mediate carefully the material of the movement. Otherwise there is a real possibility of closure and repression through sanction and public ridicule. Therefore Freud cannot speak or write without being mindful and indeed protective of this reality or condition. The text tests us, still, to encounter our own resistances and examine the extent of our own abilities to contain, empathise and remain open as we attempt to accept and flow rather than suppress the ever changing nature of being alive.
Ps. Check out this book review that I stumbled on.It reminds us of the 'Dives and Lazarus'-like abyss that exists between the 'known' and the 'proven' and is especially relevant in current debates about the hierarchy of evidence.
http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article04051002.aspx
Just as contemporary historians would be more likely to view Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a primary source account of Gibbon and a critique of the C18th rather than a serious history of the Roman Empire so it is difficult not to consider Freud’s account as more revealing of himself and the historicized moment of his being than as a translation and resolution of the commonplace thoughts of a young man. Without wishing to dismiss or denigrate Lanzer’s distress Freud’s classification of the case as ‘moderately severe on account of its longevity, the injuriousness of its effects and the patient’s own view of it’ appears somewhat excessive. There’s a vast difference between ‘the compulsion to imagine’ and the compulsion to act. Lanzer physically harmed nobody, neither his loved ones nor himself.
Freud saw Ernst Lanzer, the ‘Rat Man’, for about a year though the extant notes only cover sessions from 10th October 1907 to 20th January 1908. His published account covers the whole period. He regarded the treatment as a success. Simply, Lanzer presented with obsessional thoughts and with behaviours which he felt compelled to carry out (though, of course, he didn’t, other than in an internalized, non-injurious manner – even his compulsive train journeys always find him in some hospitable abode, i.e. he’s never without food and shelter). The case received its name from the torture he had heard about from a military officer, where rats would eat their way into the anus of the victim. The patient then ‘felt a compulsion to imagine that this fate was befalling two people dear to him’, namely his father and his fiancée, the first who he ‘revered’ and the second who he ‘loved’.
He told Freud that the rat torture was simply the latest example of these obsessive thoughts, fears and compulsive impulses which had been with him since childhood but had manifested with particular intensity in the last four years (his father had died ‘several years ago… many years ago’ according to Freud’s text).
The rat torture in various forms had been a popular pantomime horror in the public domain since roman times and some authors have suggested that Lanzer (or his officer) more likely took the account from Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau (publ 1899 and a best seller).
However, despite the almost comic absurdity of some of the sessions esp. ‘The great Obsessive Fear’, 165 – 167, when he reveals his reason for coming to Freud with great theatricality –
‘Here the patient broke off, got up from the sofa, and begged me to spare him the recital of the details’. Freud assured him he’d help him all he could by guessing what was unspeakable for Lanzer from ‘any hints he gave me’. Hence, the following unintentionally comic conversation.
“ ‘Perhaps, impalement?’_’No, not that; … almost inaudible, ‘A pot was upturned upon his buttocks…some rats were put into it…and they…’_he had again got up, and was showing every sign of horror and resistance_’… bored their way in_…’
‘_Into his anus’, I helped him out.”
Despite the above and despite the text reading like a disguised seduction narrative of an innocent maid by a man with authority (doctor or priest) from the annals of Victorian pornography… something still happens in the consulting room that is extremely exciting and, outside the confession box with its familiar template of Catholicism through which all utterances must be mediated, unique in its newness.
Freud has given Lanzer permission to speak, insisted he say whatever comes into his head. Such license didn’t even exist in theatre in 1907, or music. Mahler, Ibsen, even Strindberg, were still in thrall to the long twilight of Romanticism. Though all were struggling to break through, an uneasy order still prevailed.
Whether the storm of recollection or invention (Jung believed the neurosis obsession/compulsion clothed itself in the plausible rags of a story simply to get through - because its energy is outside the empire of speech and the only way it can be allowed safe passage through the psyche is clothed in something familiar… something understandable.) something exciting is happening in the room.
Despite Freud’s insecurity marked by his claimed compensatory percipience, his Sherlock Holmes-like ability to unravel motives, impulses, clues and reasons from the fecund outpourings of his ‘patient’ (the claim of guessing the girlfriend’s name from lanzer’s anagrammatic prayer, contradicted by his own notes) the hospitality extended to Lanzer’s every thought is something new. And something about Freud’s empathy with the outsider encourages this process.
Lanzer brings everything, talks of copulating with his sister buttock to buttock using his stool as a surrogate cock. Freud earnestly listens, respectfully dissects and suggests. He’s interested and he’s curious.
One point of view would be that as an account of an episode of therapy it simply confirms Lacan’s observation that ‘we are not cured because we ‘remember’ – we ‘remember’ because we are cured’. i.e. when ‘Rat Man’ turns up for treatment and engages, that’s the cure; not Freud’s interpretations. They’re merely the theatre that occupies Freud’s desire for worldly success and recognition enough to allow him to be present for Lanzer to speak clear.
To continue in this vein would be to say that, ironically, Freud did ‘cure’ him but not in the way he believed or offered. Freud is like a popular medium who engages in fraudulent practice because they are too frightened to trust their gifts and surrender to posterity. Hence the tangled skein of his legacy.
According to his family Lanzer simply went to Freud “to overcome his shyness so he could marry”… this from a recent book that highlights discrepancies between Freud’s notes and his published account of the sessions (with the implication that Freud ‘spun’ his notes to cast his theories and his own deductive abilities in a better light). Lanzer, incidentally, died amongst the rat-infested trenches of the Western Front in the 1st World War in 1914, seven years after his year with Freud.
What is most interesting for me (and I’ve oscillated from various positions in relation to this matter including that stated above – and suspect I’ll continue to do so) is the nature of the consulting room and the space it provides within a caste ridden Viennese society at once parochial, urbane and insecure. Here is a space (created by Freud) where it is ostensibly possible to say whatever one wants, to shout out all the repressed genii’s and acknowledge the exiled angels. Here is a place where darkness can become visible in the daylight in a respectable suburb, not in the nocturnal world of cafes and brothels where such utterances would be de rigueur. It’s a Freeport, a place where the constraints of a confined self-consciously fin de siècle society can be removed. A dangerous, intoxicating place requiring caution in how its activities are reported to the outside world.
In defence of Freud, accusations of encouragement of moral dissolution and lawlessness are never far behind alongside quackery, chicanery and fraud - the rest of the lexicon whereby we ‘deliver ourselves from evil’ and of course ‘temptation’. Hence he has to be mindful and protect himself and his insights.
The accusation of psychoanalysis encouraging or legitimizing bad behaviour – giving license and permission to our basest impulses - is a serious one, hence, in an unconscious and conscious critique of this Freud and his colleagues must mediate carefully the material of the movement. Otherwise there is a real possibility of closure and repression through sanction and public ridicule. Therefore Freud cannot speak or write without being mindful and indeed protective of this reality or condition. The text tests us, still, to encounter our own resistances and examine the extent of our own abilities to contain, empathise and remain open as we attempt to accept and flow rather than suppress the ever changing nature of being alive.
Ps. Check out this book review that I stumbled on.It reminds us of the 'Dives and Lazarus'-like abyss that exists between the 'known' and the 'proven' and is especially relevant in current debates about the hierarchy of evidence.
http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article04051002.aspx
posted by Nick Mercer at
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