The Freud Files

by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

  On this evening, Freud is already sketching out a narrative form for the material provided by his patient, but in his notes his patient’s reactions are allowed to spill over into his own interpretations. In particular, it is clear that Lanzer had rejected the idea advanced by Freud that his father had married his mother for her money. Likewise, he didn’t ‘suspect’ that he had fallen ill in order to avoid having to choose between the poor girl and the rich girl, and it had completely ‘escaped’ him that his irritation with the analyst’s unpleasant interpretation actually expressed a transferential ‘temptation’ to marry the rich girl, following his father’s example. Let us note, too, that all of this sums up one session of analysis. Let’s now look at the published version.

  Freud, case history of the Rat Man: One day the patient mentioned quite casually an event which I could not fail to recognize as the precipitating cause of his illness, or at least as the immediate occasion of the attack which had begun some six years previously and had persisted to that day. He himself had no notion that he had brought forward anything of importance . . . His mother was brought up in a wealthy family with which she was distantly connected. This family carried on a large industrial concern. His father, at the time of his marriage, had been taken into the business, and had thus by his marriage made himself a fairly comfortable position. The patient had learnt from some chaff exchanged between his parents (whose marriage was an extremely happy one) that his father, some time before making his mother’s acquaintance, had made advances to a pretty but penniless girl of humble birth . . . After his father’s death the patient’s mother told him one day that she had been discussing his future with her rich relations, and that one of her cousins had declared himself ready to let him marry one of his daughters when his education was completed . . . This family plan stirred up in him a conflict as to whether he should remain faithful to the lady he loved in spite of her poverty, or whether he should follow in his father’s footsteps and marry the lovely, rich, and well-connected girl who had been assigned to him. And he resolved this conflict, which was in fact one between his love and the persisting influence of his father’s wishes, by falling ill; or, to put it more correctly, by falling ill he avoided the task of resolving it in real life.

  . . . As was to be expected, the patient did not, to begin with, accept my elucidation of the matter. He could not imagine, he said, that the plan of marriage could have had any such effects: it had not made the slightest impression on him at the time. But in the further course of treatment he was forcibly brought to believe in the truth of my suspicion, and in a most singular manner. With the help of a transference phantasy, he experienced, as though it were new and belonged to the present, the very episode from the past which he had forgotten, or which had only passed though his mind unconsciously. There came an obscure and difficult period in the treatment; eventually it turned out that he had once met a young girl on the stairs in my house and had on the spot promoted her into being my daughter. She had pleased him, and he pictured to himself that the only reason I was so kind and incredibly patient with him was that I wanted to have him for a son-in-law . . . After we had gone through a series of the severest resistances and bitterest vituperations on his part, he could no longer remain blind to the overwhelming effect of the perfect analogy between the transference phantasy and the actual state of affairs in the past. I will repeat one of the dreams which he had at this period, so as to give an example of his manner of treating the subject. He dreamt that he saw my daughter in front of him; she had two patches of dung instead of eyes. No one who understands the language of dreams will find much difficulty in translating this one: it declared that he was marrying my daughter not for her ‘beaux yeux’ but for her money.102

  Let’s not dwell on the young girl encountered in the stairway, something which is not to be found in the analysis notes. Let’s disregard the fantasy, equally absent from the analysis notes, of becoming the analyst’s son-in-law. What is most striking is the casualness with which Freud juggles the treatment’s chronology. In the notes, Lanzer rejected the idea that his father had married his mother out of self-interest; furthermore, he was visibly irritated – a fact that Freud (during or after the session, it’s not clear) had interpreted as the transferential enactment of the conflict he attributed to his patient. In the case history, however, the Rat Man accepts Freud’s interpretation after a long and ‘obscure’ period of resistance.103 Furthermore, one of the aggressive fantasies revealed during the session (or rather, constructed by the analyst after the fact) becomes, in the case history, a dream of confirmation that Lanzer had later on, which, incidentally, enables Freud to justify and explain the arbitrary elements of his interpretation by appealing to an alleged ‘language of dreams’.104 The result is that Lanzer’s resistance is, so to speak, temporally diluted, until the moment where it evaporates, transforming itself into a confirmation of the analyst’s hypotheses. We would be hard-pressed to find a better illustration of Lacan’s thesis, according to which ‘psychoanalysis is a dialectical experience’ in which ‘truth is transmuted for the subject’105 – except that here the ‘dialectical reversal’106 which transforms the ‘no’ of the subject into the liberating ‘yes’ appears to be entirely imaginary. But the reader, of course, is not informed of this. On the contrary, he is made to believe that this interpretive projection by the analyst is a dialectical self-reflection of the patient himself.107

  The pretty postal worker and the unscrupulous gambler

  With this last example, we come close to what could taken to be the falsification of observations. Previously, we had seen Freud in acts of interpretive projection, such as when he attributed his own thoughts to his patients, or else when he transformed his own constructions into memories reported by patients on his couch. In the preceding example, though, he appears surreptitiously to modify his own analysis notes better to construct his story, just like an unscrupulous historian who alters a document to make it correspond to his version of events. Now we leave the ambiguous domain of poetic licence and narrative projection and enter into a domain where reports, and even the patients’ words, are simply rewritten.

  Example 5: On 3 October 1907, during his second session with Freud, Lanzer recounts with a great deal of repugnance how the ‘rat idea’, to which he owes his alias, came to him. He had become obsessed with the idea in August while in Galicia, where he was participating in military manoeuvres as a reserve officer. During a march, a captain Nemeczek told him of reading about an oriental torture method, in which a bowl filled with rats was attached to the posterior of the condemned man, so that the rats would gnaw a path through his anus. This evocation had elicited an obsessional fear in Lanzer that the same torture might be inflicted upon Gisela; a fear which he fended off, in no less an obsessional manner, with the help of an apotropaic formula or ‘sanction’ intended to ensure that such a thing never happened.

  In this same session, Lanzer also related how Captain Nemeczek, on the following evening, had told him to reimburse Lieutenant David a certain sum that the latter had paid for a postal package containing a pince-nez sent to Lanzer. A second ‘sanction’ had then formed in his mind: not to repay the money, because, if he did, his beloved would be submitted to the rat torture. This was immediately supplanted by an equally solemn counter-‘sanction’: to return the money to Lieutenant David, as Captain Nemeczek had suggested. But when he tried to settle his debt with Lieutenant David, he learned that Nemeczek was mistaken – it wasn’t, in fact, David who had lent him the money.

  Freud, analysis notes of 3 October 1907: ‘I went to find my accountant, a noncommissioned officer, and gave him the order to bring the 3 crowns 80 to Lieutenant David . . . He came back and told me that the aforementioned David was at an advanced post . . . An officer who was going to go into the small town offered to go to the post office and pay for me; but I was opposed to this, because I was sticking to the letter of the oath [you will give the money to David].’ (David’s relationship to th
e post office is not clear.) ‘I ended up meeting David and I offered him the 3 crowns 80 he had paid for me. He declined the offer: “I didn’t pay for anything for you.” At this moment, I was struck by this thought: there are going to be consequences, everyone will be doomed to suffer this penalty’ (because he couldn’t keep his oath). ‘Everyone’ especially means his deceased father and this woman.108

  On 4 October 1907, during the third analysis session, Freud had Lanzer again explain to him the episode of the non-reimbursement of the postal package, as he had had difficulty comprehending it during the previous session. Was the money to be given to Lieutenant David, as Captain Nemeczek had said, or else to the post office, as had been suggested to him by the officer who had gone to the ‘small town’ (Spas), which was near to where the military manoeuvres were taking place?

  Freud, analysis notes of 4 October 1907: I asked him if in fact he really hadn’t believed that the money should be handed over, not to the post office, but to David; he responded that he had had some doubts, but that in the interest of his oath, he had believed in the last hypothesis. Here there is an obscurity and uncertainty to the memory, as if he had sorted something out after the fact. Basically, at the beginning of the story – which he adds later – there was another captain, to whom he had previously been introduced, who told him that he had been asked at the post office if he knew a certain second lieutenant Lanzer, for whom there was a package to be paid for on delivery. This captain had said ‘no,’ and thus he hadn’t taken the package. Then comes the episode with Captain Nemeczek. In addition, he explains in more detail the meeting with David, who tells him that he wasn’t the one responsible for the mail, but lieutenant Engel. Here, an oversight on my part: during the afternoon nap, he had reasoned out, so to speak, in his dream, how to sort everything out and he stated the following: he would go to the post office with the two officers, David and Engel; there, David would give the 3.80 to the young woman (Postfraülein) working there, the young woman would hand it to Engel, and he himself [Lanzer], in accordance with the oath, would pay 3.80 to David.109

  To make things clear, let’s emphasise some salient points. The anonymous Captain didn’t pick the package up at the post office, and he wasn’t the one who paid for Lanzer. Furthermore, it wasn’t Lieutenant David, contrary to what Captain Nemeczek had mistakenly told him, nor the person behind the counter (which would be absurd). As the context clearly indicates, it’s Lieutenant Engel, ‘who was responsible for the mail’ bound for soldiers on manoeuvres, who paid for the package – which explains why, in the quasi-delirious circuit of restitution worked out in Lanzer’s half-dream, Engel, and not ‘the young woman at the post office’, is the final recipient of the 3.80 crowns. As for this young woman at the post office, it’s not the anonymous Captain who mentions her (he only speaks of the ‘post office’), but Lanzer (even though he hadn’t been to the post office and thus had no way of knowing if the person behind the counter was a man or woman). In reality, this ‘young woman’ only appears in the fantasy of restitution which Lanzer, during his restless nap, had ‘reasoned out, so to speak, in his dream’.

  Lanzer’s story continues. After hesitating a long time to ask Lieutenant David to take part in his incredible fantasy of restitution, he takes the train and returns to Vienna in a state of great agitation. There, calmed by his friend Galatzer, he finally succeeds in overcoming his inhibition to pay the debt, and he sends the money ‘to the post office in Galicia’.110 This last point, we should note, in no way contradicts the fact that the sum was owed to Lieutenant Engel. In fact, he should address the money order to the post office in Spas, because this is where Engel came to pick up mail for the soldiers on manoeuvres.

  If we now turn to the published case history, we notice that Freud ignores this fact to argue, in a completely unexpected manner, that the sum was, in reality, owed ‘to no one but the official at the post office’.

  Freud, case history of the Rat Man: It was this last statement which provided me with a starting-point from which I could begin straightening out the various distortions involved in his story. After his friend had brought him to his senses he had dispatched the small sum of money in question neither to Lieutenant A. [David] nor to Lieutenant B. [Engel], but direct to the post office. He must therefore have known that he owed the amount of the charges due upon the packet to no one but the official [in the masculine: dem Postbeamten] at the post office, and he must have known this before he started on his journey. It turned out that in fact he had known it before the captain [Nemeczek] made his request and before he himself made his vow; for he now remembered that a few hours before meeting the cruel captain he had had occasion to introduce himself to another captain, who had told him how matters actually stood. This officer, on hearing his name, had told him that he had been at the post office a short time before, and that the young lady there (Postfräulein) had asked him whether he knew a Lieutenant L. (the patient, that is), for whom a packet had arrived, to be paid for on delivery. The officer had replied that he did not, but the young lady (das Fräulein) had been of the opinion that she could trust the unknown lieutenant and had said that in the meantime she would pay the charges herself. It had been in this way that the patient had come into possession of the pince-nez he had ordered. The cruel captain had made a mistake when, as he handed him over the packet, he had asked him to pay back the 3.80 kronen to A. [David], and the patient must have known it was a mistake. In spite of this he had made a vow founded upon this mistake, a vow that was bound to be a torment to him.111

  We cannot help but be struck by the liberties Freud takes with his patient’s story, as well as by the improbability of the narrative he substitutes for it. The young woman at the post office whom Lanzer fantasised in his half-sleep becomes a definitive actor, whose words are reported to us. Better yet, this bureaucrat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire decides to pay the postage fee for this unknown soldier in transit. And Freud now claims – contradicting his own notes – that it was the anonymous Captain who had explained all this to Lanzer, and that the latter had known all along that the money was neither owed to David nor to Engel. (But to whom had the generous post office worker given the package, and how did it finally end up in Captain Nemeczek’s hands? It remains a mystery.)

  Why did Freud engage in this retelling? And why did he so forcefully maintain that Lanzer owed the money to the imaginary young woman at the post office, rather than to Lieutenant Engel? We needn’t look very far to find the answer. In the section titled ‘The paternal complex and the solution to the rat idea’, Freud explains that the story of the anonymous Captain had revived in Lanzer’s unconscious his identification with his father.

  Freud, case history of the Rat Man: But the information that the young lady at the post office at Z [Spas] had herself paid the charges due upon the packet, with a complimentary remark about himself, 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.112

  We now understand why Freud seems to have been impelled to insert the generous postal worker in the narrative: to establish a counterpart for the pretty innkeeper’s daughter, and thus create an otherwise nonexistent symmetry with the (no less constructed – see example 4) story of Lanzer’s father, who had supposedly hesitated between a poor girl and a rich girl.113 Freud appears to have made up this episode to make his patient’s narrative coincide with his Oedipal hypothesis. One might ask whether this doesn’t apply also to what is said about the
innkeeper’s daughter, who is mentioned nowhere in the handwritten notes. Regardless, whether there was no girl or only one girl, the fact remains that there is no evidence for a competition between two girls, nor, consequently, any symmetry between the father’s and son’s stories. This symmetry, which is integral to the ingenious ‘solution to the rat idea’ proposed by Freud, appears not to exist.

  Example 6: On 30 November 1907, Lanzer recounts various anecdotes from the period when his father was a soldier.

  Freud, analysis notes of 30 November 1907: On one occasion, his father had ten florins of regimental money in his hands to meet certain expenses. He lost some of it in a game of cards with some other men, let himself be tempted to go on playing and lost the whole of it. He lamented to one of his companions that he would have to shoot himself. ‘By all means shoot yourself,’ said the other, ‘a man who does a thing like this ought to shoot himself,’ but then lent him the money. After ending his military service, his father tried to find the man, but failed. (Did he ever pay him back?)114