Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis

Freud's case history of the "Rat Man", published in 1909 in the second half of the first volume of the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen. The patient, a young lawyer, was tormented by obsessional fears that a punishment involving rats would befall his father, who was already dead, and the lady he admired. The paper falls into two parts: the first presents extracts from the treatment, the second sets out a theory of obsessional neurosis. Freud traces the patient's compulsions and doubts to an intense ambivalence of love and hate toward his father, to sexual experiences and punishments in childhood, and to a belief in the omnipotence of thoughts, and he shows how obsessional thinking hides its meaning through displacement, isolation and the distortion of wording.