Sigmund Freud Mental Illness

The toll of mental illness on humans is undeniably a massive burden. It can prey on people of any age, race, class or gender lacking any real limits. In addition, it can take on innumerable forms, presenting itself through a vast array of symptoms along a wide range of severity. Many people carry around irregularities they may not even know about while it could entirely consume the lives of others. This level of impedance on one’s ability to live is what drives people to seek help for these mental ills they can neither explain nor treat. However, it is not until relatively recently that there was help to be found. Sigmund Freud was one of the leading pioneers in psychology and its accompanying abnormalities. He dedicated his life to studying …show more content…
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