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When Freud conducted the treatment of the Rat Man, he had not yet traced the instinctual etiology of obsessional neurosis to anal eroticism; given his evolving theory at the time, he accorded primary differential importance to psychological rather to instinctual processes. Limited clinical theory, along with counter-transference, hampered Freud's attempt in his case history to explore his patient's obsessional neurosis and so-called father complex. In particular, the process notes to that case history detail the clinical interference caused by Freud's own mother complex and obsessionality (his intellectualization, omnipotence of thoughts, and instinctual anality). The interference of these counter-transferential phenomena culminated in the clinical neglect of the Rat Man's body schema that was unsettled by an intra-sessional meal, whose impact undercut the psychoanalytic treatment.
The study of the process notes also exemplifies putting into practice a series of methodological desiderata, specific and general. They include, among other things, an approach to Freud the writer through the examination of Freud as self-reader, manifest in his underlinings and marginal notes found in the process notes; the exploration of lexical traces proper to obsessional neurosis, which Freud defined as a disorder of contiguity; and the indispensable analysis of our transference to Freud the writer, an analysis that characterizes the distinctiveness of any interpretive reading that claims to be psychoanalytic.
Au moment où Freud a traité l'Homme aux rats, il n'avait pas encore associé l'étiologie pulsionnelle de la névrose obsessionnelle à l'erotisme anal; comme sa théorie était en cours d'élaboration à cette époque, il a accordé une importance plus grande aux processus psychologiques qu'aux processus pulsionnels. Les limites de la théeorie clinique ainsi que le contre-transfert ont entravé Freud dans sa tentative d'examiner, avec l'histoire de cas de l'Homme aux rats, la névrose obsessionnelle de son patient et le prétendu complexe paternel de ce dernier. Les notes prises par Freud pendant cette cure font état en details de l'interférence clinique causée par le complexe mater nel de Freud lui-même etpar son caractère obsessif (intellectualisation, toute-puissance de la pensée, analité). L'interférence de ces phénomènes contre-transférentiels a culminé au moment où Freud a neglige, sur le plan clinique, le schema corporel de l'Homme aux rats, derange par un rep as que le patient avait ingéré entre deux séances; cette négligence...