The Rat Man’s real name was Lorenz and he was a young man in his early twenties who first came to Freud in 1907. He presented with a great number of alarming interconnected symptoms and compulsions, the most notable of which relates to his obsessive fear of a certain type of torture. He was told how, in the East, “The criminal is tied up and placed face down: a bucket is put upside down on his buttocks and rats are placed in it. Gradually they bore their way into the man’s body through his anus” (Perelberg 179). The Lorenz became irrationally obsessed with the thought of this torture being inflected on his lover or father if he did not complete the simple task of properly reimbursing a fellow officer for a packed they had paid for. This as well as intrusive suicidal thoughts and other harmful symptoms plagued the Lorenz for months before he met Freud (Perelberg 178-80). It was determined by Freud that learning of this torture had stimulated Lorenz’s anal erotic instinct from childhood, solidifying Freud’s his psychoanalytic theory of consciousness and repression as the source of this
The Rat Man’s real name was Lorenz and he was a young man in his early twenties who first came to Freud in 1907. He presented with a great number of alarming interconnected symptoms and compulsions, the most notable of which relates to his obsessive fear of a certain type of torture. He was told how, in the East, “The criminal is tied up and placed face down: a bucket is put upside down on his buttocks and rats are placed in it. Gradually they bore their way into the man’s body through his anus” (Perelberg 179). The Lorenz became irrationally obsessed with the thought of this torture being inflected on his lover or father if he did not complete the simple task of properly reimbursing a fellow officer for a packed they had paid for. This as well as intrusive suicidal thoughts and other harmful symptoms plagued the Lorenz for months before he met Freud (Perelberg 178-80). It was determined by Freud that learning of this torture had stimulated Lorenz’s anal erotic instinct from childhood, solidifying Freud’s his psychoanalytic theory of consciousness and repression as the source of this