The Wolfman and Other Cases by Sigmund Freud

Author:Sigmund Freud [Freud, Sigmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101644805
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2003-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

FIG. 1

He was also familiar, however, with the rat’s significance as a carrier of dangerous infections and could therefore use it as a symbol of the fear of syphilitic infection that is so justifiably to be found in military circles; behind this were hidden all kinds of doubts as to his father’s lifestyle at the time when he was serving in the army. Put another way, the carrier of syphilitic infection was the penis itself, so that the rat could become the sexual member, and was entitled for another reason to be so regarded. The penis, particularly that of a small boy, could easily be described as a worm, and in the captain’s narrative the rats were burrowing in the anus, just like the great roundworms of his childhood. Thus the rats’ meaning as penis was again grounded in anal eroticism. The rat is in any case a dirty animal, which feeds on excrement and lives in sewers that carry waste.36 It is probably unnecessary to spell out how much further the rat delirium could spread in the light of this new meaning. ‘So many rats – so many florins’ might for example be an excellent way of characterizing a female profession which he greatly despised. On the other hand, it is doubtless not without significance that the substitution of penis for rat in the captain’s narrative produces a situation involving intercourse per anum, which must have appeared particularly repugnant to him with reference to his father and his mistress. And when we consider that this situation recurred in the compulsive threat which formed in his mind after the captain’s admonition it would unmistakably recall certain curses used by the Southern Slavs, the phrasing of which can be read in Anthropophyteia, edited by F. S. Krauß. This and other material all came into the rat discussion, incidentally, under cover of the notion of ‘marriage’, and contributed to the structuring of it.

The way in which the tale of the rat punishment threw into turmoil those prematurely suppressed impulses to selfish and sexual cruelty in our patient is confirmed by his own description and by the expressions on his face when retelling the story. And yet, despite all this wealth of material, we could shed no light on the meaning of his compulsive idea until one day the Rat-Wife in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf came up in conversation and led us to the irrefutable conclusion that in many of the forms of expression taken by his compulsive delirious fantasies rats also signified children.37 In seeking to understand how this new meaning had come about we immediately discovered its oldest and most significant roots. Once when visiting his father’s grave he had seen a large animal, which he took to be a rat, scampering past the low mound.38 He assumed that it had come out of the grave itself and had just been feeding on his father’s corpse. It is an inseparable part of our notion of the rat that its sharp teeth gnaw

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