Freud - Complete Works (373 page)

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2164

   And now the path was clear to the
solution of his rat idea. The treatment had reached its
turning-point, and a quantity of material information which had
hitherto been withheld became available, and so made possible a
reconstruction of the whole concatenation of events.

   In my description I shall, as I
have already said, content myself with the briefest possible
summary of the circumstances. Obviously the first problem to be
solved was why the two speeches of the Czech captain - his rat
story, and his request to the patient that he should pay back the
money to Lieutenant A. - should have had such an agitating effect
on him and should have provoked such violently pathological
reactions. The presumption was that it was a question of
‘complexive sensitiveness’, and that the speeches had
jarred upon certain hyperaesthetic spots in his unconscious. And so
it proved to be. As always happened with the patient in connection
with military matters, he had been in a state of unconscious
identification with his father, who had seen many years’
service and had been full of stories of his soldiering days. Now it
happened by chance - for chance may play a part in the formation of
a symptom, just as the wording may help in the making of a joke -
that one of his father’s little adventures had an important
element in common with the captain’s request. His father, in
his capacity as non-commissioned officer, had control over a small
sum of money and had on one occasion lost it at cards. (Thus he had
been a ‘
Spielratte
’.¹) He would have found
himself in a serious position if one of his comrades had not
advanced him the amount. After he had left the army and become
well-off, he had tried to find this friend in need so as to pay him
back the money, but had not managed to trace him. The patient was
uncertain whether he had ever succeeded in returning the money. The
recollection of this sin of his father’s youth was painful to
him, for, in spite of appearances, his unconscious was filled with
hostile strictures upon his father’s character. The
captain’s words, ‘You must pay back the 3.80
kronen
to Lieutenant A.’, had sounded to his ears like
an allusion to this unpaid debt of his father’s.

  
¹
[Literally, ‘play-rat’.
Colloquial German for ‘gambler’.]

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2165

   But the information that the
young lady at the post office at Z-- had herself paid the charges
due upon the packet, with a complimentary remark about
himself,¹ had intensified his identification with his father
in quite another direction. At this stage in the analysis he
brought out some new information, to the effect that the landlord
of the inn at the little place where the post office was had had a
pretty daughter. She had been decidedly encouraging to the smart
young officer, so that he had thought of returning there after the
manoeuvres were over and of trying his luck with her. Now, however,
she had a rival in the shape of the young lady at the post office.
Like his father in the tale of his marriage, he could afford now to
hesitate upon which of the two he should bestow his favours when he
had finished his military service. We can see at once that his
singular indecision whether he should travel to Vienna or go back
to the place where the post office was, and the constant temptation
he felt to turn back while he was on the journey (
p. 2140
), were not so senseless as they
seemed to us at first. To his conscious mind, the attraction
exercised upon him by Z--, the place where the post office was, was
explained by the necessity of seeing Lieutenant A. and fulfilling
the vow with his assistance. But in reality what was attracting him
was the young lady at the post office, and the lieutenant was
merely a good substitute for her, since he had lived at the same
place and had himself been in charge of the military postal
service. And when subsequently he heard that it was not Lieutenant
A. but another officer B., who had been on duty at the post office
that day, he drew
him
into his combination as well; and he
was then able to reproduce in his deliria in connection with the
two officers the hesitation he felt between the two girls who were
so kindly disposed towards him.²

  
¹
It must not be forgotten that he had learnt
this
before
the captain, owing to a misapprehension,
requested him to pay back the money to Lieutenant A. This
circumstance was the vital point of the story, and by suppressing
it the patient reduced himself to a state of the most hopeless
muddle and for some time prevented me from getting any idea of the
meaning of it all.

  
²
(
Footnote added
1923:) My patient
did his very best to throw confusion over the little episode of the
repayment of the charges for his pince-nez, so that perhaps my own
account of it may also have failed to clear it up entirely. I
therefore reproduce here a little map (Fig. 5), by means of which
Mr. and Mrs. Strachey have endeavoured to make the situation at the
end of the manoeuvres plainer. My translators have justly observed
that the patient’s behaviour remains unintelligible so long
as a further circumstance is not expressly stated, namely, that
Lieutenant A. had formerly lived at the place Z-- where the post
office was situated and had been in charge of the military post
office there, but that during the last few days he had handed over
this billet to Lieutenant B. and had been transferred to another
village. The ‘cruel’ captain had been in ignorance of
this transfer, and this was the explanation of his mistake in
supposing that the charges had to be paid back to Lieutenant
A.

Fig. 5.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2166

   In elucidating the effects
produced by the captain’s rat story we must follow the course
of the analysis more closely. The patient began by producing an
enormous mass of associative material, which at first, however,
threw no light upon the circumstances in which the formation of his
obsession had taken place. The idea of the punishment carried out
by means of rats had acted as a stimulus to a number of his
instincts and had called up a whole quantity of recollections; so
that, in the short interval between the captain’s story and
his request to him to pay back the money, rats had acquired a
series of symbolic meanings, to which, during the period which
followed, fresh ones were continually being added. I must confess
that I can only give a very incomplete account of the whole
business. What the rat punishment stirred up more than anything
else was his
anal erotism
, which had played an important
part in his childhood and had been kept in activity for many years
by a constant irritation due to worms. In this way rats came to
have the meaning of ‘
money
’.¹ The patient
gave an indication of this connection by reacting to the word
‘
Ratten
’ [‘rats’] with the
association ‘
Raten
’ [‘instalments’].
In his obsessional deliria he had coined himself a regular rat
currency. When, for instance, in reply to a question, I told him
the amount of my fee for an hour’s treatment, he said to
himself (as I learned six months later): ‘So many florins, so
many rats’. Little by little he translated into this language
the whole complex of money interests which centred round his
father’s legacy to him, that is to say, all his ideas
connected with that subject were, by way of the verbal bridge
‘
Raten - Ratten
’, carried over into his
obsessional life and brought under the dominion of his unconscious.
Moreover, the captain’s request to him to pay back the
charges due upon the packet served to strengthen the money
significance of rats, by way of another verbal bridge
‘
Spielratte
’, which led back to his
father’s gambling debt.

  
¹
See my paper on ‘Character and Anal
Erotism’ (1908
b
).

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2167

   But the patient was also familiar
with the fact that rats are carriers of dangerous infectious
diseases; he could therefore employ them as symbols of his dread
(justifiable enough in the army) of
syphilitic infection
.
This dread concealed all sorts of doubts as to the kind of life his
father had led during his term of military service. Again, in
another sense, the
penis
itself is a carrier of syphilitic
infection; and in this way he could consider the rat as a male
organ of sex. It had a further title to be so regarded; for a penis
(especially a child’s penis) can easily be compared to a
worm
, and the captain’s story had been about rats
burrowing in some one’s anus, just as the large round-worms
had in his when he was a child. Thus the penis significance of rats
was based, once more, upon anal erotism. And apart from this, the
rat is a dirty animal, feeding upon excrement and living in
sewers.¹ It is perhaps unnecessary to point out how great an
extension of the rat delirium became possible owing to this new
meaning. For instance, ‘So many rats, so many florins’
could serve as an excellent characterization of a certain female
profession which he particularly detested. On the other hand, it is
certainly not a matter of indifference that the substitution of a
penis for a rat in the captain’s story resulted in a
situation of intercourse
per anum
, which could not fail to
be especially revolting to him when brought into connection with
his father and the woman he loved. And when we consider that the
same situation was reproduced in the compulsive threat which had
formed in his mind after the captain had made his request, we shall
be forcibly reminded of certain curses in use among the Southern
Slavs.² Moreover, all of this material, and more besides, was
woven into the fabric of the rat discussions behind the
screen-association ‘
heiraten
’ [‘to
marrry’].

  
¹
If the reader feels tempted to shake his
head at the possibility of such leaps of imagination in the
neurotic mind, I may remind him that artists have sometimes
indulged in similar freaks of fancy. Such, for instance, are Le
Poitevin’s
Diableries érotiques
.

  
²
The exact terms of these curses will be
found in the periodical
Anthropophyteia
, edited by F. S.
Krauss.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2168

   The story of the rat punishment,
as was shown by the patient’s own account of the matter and
by his facial expression as he repeated the story to me, had fanned
into a flame all his prematurely suppressed impulses of cruelty,
egoistic and sexual alike. Yet, in spite of all this wealth of
material, no light was thrown upon the meaning of his obsessional
idea until one day the Rat-Wife in Ibsen’s
Little
Eyolf
came up in the analysis, and it became impossible to
escape the inference that in many of the shapes assumed by his
obsessional deliria rats had another meaning still - namely, that
of
children
.¹ Enquiry into the origin of this new
meaning at once brought me up against some of the earliest and most
important roots. Once when the patient was visiting his
father’s grave he had seen a big beast, which he had taken to
be a rat, gliding along over the grave.² He assumed that it
had actually come out of his father’s grave, and had just
been having a meal off his corpse. The notion of a rat is
inseparably bound up with the fact that it has sharp teeth with
which it gnaws and bites.³ But rats cannot be sharp-toothed,
greedy and dirty with impunity: they are cruelly persecuted and
mercilessly put to death by man, as the patient had often observed
with horror. He had often pitied the poor creatures. But he himself
had been just such a nasty, dirty little wretch, who was apt to
bite people when he was in a rage, and had been fearfully punished
for doing so (
p. 2162
). He could
truly be said to find ‘a living likeness of himself’ in
the rat. It was almost as though Fate, when the captain told him
his story, had been putting him through an association test: she
had called out a ‘complex stimulus-word’, and he had
reacted to it with his obsessional idea.

  
¹
Ibsen’s Rat-Wife must certainly be
derived from the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin, who first enticed
away the rats into the water, and then, by the same means, lured
the children out of the town, never to return. So too, Little Eyolf
threw himself into the water under the spell of the Rat-Wife. In
legends generally the rat appears not so much as a disgusting
creature but as something uncanny - as a chthonic animal, one might
almost say; and it is used to represent the souls of the
dead.