The Freud Files

by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

  We should note that the patient says only that his father had tried in vain to find this man after leaving the army, not that the goal of his search had been to reimburse him (there is nothing in the text to dissuade us from thinking that he had already settled his debt before that). It appears to be Freud who, composing his notes that same night, wonders in parentheses if the father had ever repaid his debt, and who, on subsequently reviewing these notes, underlines in pencil this passage that catches his attention.115 It’s easy to understand why he asks this question: the symptom that had led Lanzer to consult him was a compulsive inhibition preventing him from reimbursing a sum that had been advanced during military manoeuvres. Freud, reflecting on that day’s session, is therefore struck by the analogy between the two situations;116 he wonders if the father repaid his debt before leaving the army or if, on the other hand, he sought in vain to do it later – in which case the symmetry between father and son would be perfectly clear. But there are no signs that he asked Lanzer: the following session, which takes place after the space of a week, takes off in a completely different direction, and the question never reappears elsewhere in his notes.

  Four months later, Freud plunges back into his notes in preparation for a four-hour lecture on the Lanzer case, which he is to give on 27 April 1908 at the ‘Meeting of Freudian psychologists’ of Salzburg.117 Meanwhile, Jung had been asking him repeatedly to present one of his cases, rather than a ‘declaration of principle’,118 as he originally intended.

  Jung to Freud, 11 March 1908: I ask you for a casuistic presentation. We can all follow this. To my taste I would still prefer this to your suggestion to speak about psychanalysis.119

  Jung, clearly, was hoping that Freud would finally provide the detailed description of a completed analysis that everyone had been waiting for. Freud, who, surprisingly, seems to have been short on completed analyses (in 1908!), decided at the last moment to give a lecture on Lanzer, despite the fact that this latest analysis wasn’t ‘finished’.

  Freud to Jung, 13 March 1908: Now about my lecture – I give in . . . A report on a case I am now engaged in might at a pinch be compressed into an hour, but the case is not finished, the decisive phase and outcome are still lacking, one mustn’t count one’s chickens, etc. If it should turn out badly, I want to be free to substitute something else; who knows what may happen in six weeks?120

  This case also provided Freud with a felicitous opportunity to present a ‘defence and illustration’ of his theory of obsessional neurosis, which Janet had criticised in his monumental work Obsessions and Psychasthenia.121 Thus, given the stakes, it was urgent that Freud ‘finish’ Lanzer’s analysis. On 8 April, during a meeting of the Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna, Freud announced that he had discovered the solution to the ‘rat idea’ (a ‘solution’, let us note, which is only a preliminary draft of what he will put forward in the published case history).

  Minutes of the Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna, meeting of 8 April 1908: Prof. Freud reports on the solution of the rat idea in the obsessional neurotic; it means . . . the identification with his father, who also was in the army and contracted a gambling debt there; a friend loaned his father money to settle his debt; his father probably never paid this debt since he was a ‘Spielratte’ (‘gambling rat’).122

  Evidently, Freud still hadn’t made the effort to question his patient on this rather crucial point. In his notes, Lanzer asserted that his father had never located his friend, which left only two possibilities open: either his father had repaid the debt before the end of his military service, or else he had never repaid him. Nevertheless, Freud says here that he had probably never paid him back, which makes it rather clear that he didn’t know anything more about this point than before.123 The only reason Freud provides to make us believe that the father had ‘probably’ never settled his debt is that he was a Spielratte – certainly a very striking association, but one which is absent from his handwritten notes. Are we to suppose, therefore, that this association came to Lanzer during a session after 20 January? Let’s continue following the evolution of the case history.

  Freud, case history of the Rat Man: 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 . . . 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’.) 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 . . . 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.124

  Freud, case history of the Rat Man: In this way rats came to have the meaning of ‘money’ . . . All his ideas connected with that subject were, by way of the verbal bridge ‘Raten – Ratten’ [‘instalments’ – ‘rats’], carried over into his obsessional life and brought under the dominion of the 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 fault (Spielverfehlung).125

  This last passage tends to reinforce our suspicion about the Spielratte association, as the context in which it appears clearly indicates that it functions as a ‘verbal bridge’, of which the patient was not aware – and thus was ‘constructed’ by the analyst for the demands of his line of reasoning. It appears to be Freud rather than Lanzer who characterises the father as a Spielratte in order to increase the ‘probability’ that he had never settled his debt. All the same, Freud now treats this probability as a certainty: the case history speaks of the father’s ‘unpaid debt’, of his ‘sin’ and of his ‘gambling fault’. We are even told that he had tried, in vain, to locate his friend ‘so as to pay him back the money’ – something that there are no indications that the son had said to Freud (if he had, why would Freud, in his notes, wonder if the father had ever repaid his debt?).

  Freud regretfully adds: ‘The patient was uncertain whether he had ever succeeded in returning the money’, thus attributing an uncertainty to Lanzer that was in fact his own at the moment he was composing his notes. Had Freud in the meantime questioned Lanzer on the matter, and had the latter informed Freud that he didn’t know if his father had settled his debt? But this question only increases our confusion, because if Lanzer wasn’t sure whether his father ever ‘succeeded’ in locating his friend to return the sum he owed him, how does Freud know that he had not found him – if it’s not from his notes, the version of which he maintains on this point without realising that he unwittingly contradicts himself? And above all, what authorises Freud to proceed by attributing his patient’s uncertainty to the fact that ‘the recollection of this sin of his father’s youth was painful to him’, if the patient himself didn’t know whether or not his father had repaid his debt – in short, if he had sinned or not? In reality, the patient’s testimony is only invoked in order for Freud immediately to disqualify it in favour of the hypothesis he prefers. In the process, Freud will have nevertheless created the illusion that there was such an account provided by Lanzer, and that his insistence that the father’s debt was never repaid comes from Lanzer himself. But there is no evidence in the analysis notes to support this perception, while the contradictions in the published version suggest that Freud hadn’t any confirmation of his hypothesis from the patient. The father’s unpaid debt, this key element of the ‘solution to the rat idea’ – and of so many other post-Freudian reinterpretations of this case – appears to have o
nly ever existed in Freud’s mind. And yet, we are all prevailed upon to believe that it was, in fact, a memory reported by the famous ‘Rat Man’.

  Lacan: It is by recognising the forced subjectivisation of the obsessive debt – in the scenario of futile attempts at restitution, a scenario that too perfectly expresses its imaginary terms for the subject to even try to enact it, the pressure to repay the debt being exploited by the subject to the point of delusion – that Freud achieves his goal. This is the goal of bringing the subject to rediscover – in the story of his father’s lack of delicacy, his marriage to the subject’s mother, the ‘pretty but penniless girl,’ his wounded love-life, and his ungrateful forgetting of his beneficent friend – to rediscover in this story, along with the fateful constellation that presided over the subject’s very birth, the unfillable gap constituted by the symbolic debt of which his neurosis is the act of protest.126

  Lacan: [The Rat Man’s ‘deeper truth’] is situated solely in what Freud refers to here as the ‘word chain’ – which, making itself heard both in the neurosis and in the subject’s destiny, extends well beyond him as an individual – and consists in the fact that a . . . lack of good faith presided over his father’s marriage and that this ambiguity itself covered over a breach of trust in money matters which, in causing his father to be discharged from the army, determined the latter’s decision whom to marry.127 Now this chain, which is not made up of pure events (all of which had, in any case, occurred prior to the subject’s birth), but rather of a failure (which was perhaps the most serious because it was the most subtle) to live up to the truth of speech and of an infamy more sullying to his honor – the debt engendered by the failure seeming to have cast its shadow over the whole of his parents’ marriage, and the debt engendered by the infamy never having been paid – this chain provides the meaning by which we can understand the simulacrum of redemption that the subject foments to the point of delusion in the course of the great obsessive trance that leads him to ask Freud for help.128

  The return of the Wolf Man

  Let’s now consider a final example. Up until now, we have used Freud’s analysis notes to reveal, by simple comparison, the rewriting of observational data in his case histories. This is not, however, the only means available to the historian to unearth the interprefactive work hidden behind the narrative façade of Freud’s ‘patient histories’. If one is ready to assume the role of detective, one can also defy the medical secret invoked by Freud and attempt to find the patients themselves – or their friends and relatives – to ask them their version of the story. It’s a long-drawn-out task, full of uncertainty (some have spent their research careers doing so), but in the absence of the analysis notes it’s often the only means available to find an external point of reference for Freud’s case histories. Over the years, the identifications of ‘Anna O.’,129 ‘Emmy von N.’,130 ‘Elisabeth von R.’,131 ‘Cäcilie M.’,132 ‘Katharina’,133 ‘Mr E’,134 ‘Dora’,135 etc. have allowed historians to reopen the black boxes of these famous ‘cases’, revealing the often considerable discrepancies between Freud’s histories and the testimony of the patients themselves, or else that of their close friends and family.

  Example 7: The most brilliant ‘coup’ in this regard is undoubtedly the discovery of the Wolf Man’s actual identity in 1973 by the Austrian journalist Karin Obholzer. The previous year, the philanthropist/psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner had published the anonymous ‘Memoirs’ of the Wolf Man, a moving document honouring psychoanalysis. This piece was sandwiched between a preface by Anna Freud and two articles by Ruth Mack Brunswick and Gardiner herself devoted to Freud’s exemplary patient – the single one, among all his peers, to be ‘willing to cooperate actively in the reconstruction and follow-up of his own case’.136 The Wolf Man, we learned in this book, led a peaceful life retired in Vienna, where he had spent his career in an insurance company after the loss of his fortune in Russia. His identity, as it happens, didn’t seem to be a secret for the series of psychoanalysts who had come to visit and question him about his analysis with Freud. Intrigued, Karin Obholzer decided to find him in order to write an article about him.

  Karin Obholzer: It was relatively easy. Freud, in his case history, gives the Wolfman’s name as Sergei P. and I knew from Muriel Gardiner’s book that he was still living in Vienna. So I started by looking up under ‘P’ in the telephone book. He wasn’t listed, but then he might just not have the telephone (which he didn’t, as I found out later). I therefore looked him up in the so-called ‘address-book.’ I don’t think this address-book exists anymore, but at that time, anybody who rented an apartment in Vienna in any given year would be listed in it. I was looking for a Russian name and since the second letter of the Wolfman’s true name is ‘A,’ I didn’t have to look for too long: Pankejeff, Sergius. It had to be him!137

  Sergius Constantinovitch Pankejeff, who received money from the Sigmund Freud Archives,138 and around whom Kurt Eissler and Muriel Gardiner had established a tight sanitary cordon,139 seems to have been rather excited to be discovered by someone outside the International Psychoanalytic Association. Having gained his confidence, Obholzer succeeded in convincing him to agree to a series of interviews, despite pressure exerted on him by Eissler and Gardiner to deny her request.140 Pankejeff, however, made the condition that these interviews were not be published until after his death. Reading them, we quickly understand why: near the end of a life spent obediently conforming to the role of the ‘Wolf Man’, Pankejeff turned against his benefactors and invalidated, with a touch of vindictiveness, much that Freud, Mack Brunswick and Gardiner had written about him. Essentially, these three claimed that his different periods of analysis with Freud (1910–14, 1919–20) and Mack Brunswick (1926–7, 1929–?, 1938) had allowed him to lead a normal and productive life.

  Freud, 1923: I parted from him [in 1914], regarding him as cured . . . Since then [the Wolf Man’s reanalysis in 1919–20] the patient has felt normal and has behaved unexceptionably.141

  Freud, 1937: His good state of health has been interrupted by attacks of illness which can only be construed as offshoots of his perennial neurosis. Thanks to the skill of one of my pupils, Dr. Ruth Mack Brunswick, a short course of treatment has on each occasion brought these conditions to an end.142

  Ruth Mack Brunswick: The therapeutic results [of Pankejeff’s analysis with Mack Brunswick] were excellent and remained so, according to my last information in 1940, despite major personal crises.143

  Muriel Gardiner: There can be no doubt that Freud’s analysis saved the Wolfman from a crippled existence, and Dr. Brunswick’s reanalysis overcame a serious acute crisis, both enabling the Wolfman to lead a long and tolerably healthy life.144

  Not so, Pankejeff retorted. Sixty years after his first analysis with Freud, he was still suffering from obsessional ruminations and bouts of deep depression,145 despite the subsequent and almost constant analytic treatment he had received since then (after the war, he had been in successive analyses with Alfred von Winterstein,146 an unidentified female analyst (Eva Laible?) and Wilhelm Solms; to this ought to be added a stay at a psychoanalytic counselling clinic in 1955,147 as well as daily ‘analytically directed conversations’148 with Kurt Eissler when the latter returned to Vienna during the summer).

  Pankejeff: In reality the whole thing looks like a catastrophe. I am in the same state as when I first came to Freud, and Freud is no more.149

  Pankejeff: Instead of doing me some good, psychoanalysts did me harm . . . That was the theory, that Freud had cured me 100 percent . . . And that’s why [Gardiner] recommended that I write memoirs. To show the world how Freud had cured a seriously ill person . . . It’s all false.150

  What then about Freud’s interpretation of his childhood nightmare, the ‘primal scene’, his parents’ coitus a tergo thrice repeated? Pankejeff had never believed it, and he had never remembered it, contrary to what Freud led his readers to believe in the case history (see our example 3 above).

  Panke
jeff That scene in the dream where the windows open and so on and the wolves are sitting there, and his interpretation, I don’t know, those things are miles apart. It’s terribly farfetched.151

  Obholzer He [Pankejeff] would come back to this subject very often, and he always insisted that he had never remembered the scene postulated by Freud. Freud told him that the memory would come back eventually, but it never did.152

  What about the scene with the maid Grusha, crouched on all fours, which had supposedly reminded him of his mother’s position during the primal scene, and to which Freud attributed his compulsive attractions to women of a lower social status? Once again, Pankejeff had no memory of it.

  Pankejeff: I cannot remember. I cannot even remember this Grusha. She was a maid, I believe. But I cannot remember details.153

  And his exclusive taste for coitus a tergo, in which Freud also saw an echo of the primal scene? Pankejeff categorically denied having had a particular preference for this sexual position.

  Obholzer To get back to sexuality: Freud says somewhere that you preferred a certain position during intercourse, the one from behind . . .

  Pankejeff Well, that was no absolute, you know . . .

  Obholzer . . . that you enjoyed it less in other positions.