Rat Man - Criticism of Freud

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 showed through 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 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 also objected to Freud's downplaying of the role of the Rat Man's mother, and for several deviations on his part from what would later become standard psychoanalytic practice.