Kristeva

Freud also attended to signs from his adult patients in arriving at interpretations of the unconscious meaning underlying their ills. He did this in the case of Dora (see p. 26). He also did this in the case of his obsessional lawyer patient, Ernst Lanzer. Faced with Lanzer ‘showing every sign of horror and resistance’, as Freud put it, as he recounted the rat punishment with which he was obsessed, Freud conveyed these signs to his readers by reporting, as follows, Lanzer’s stammering account of the punishment: ‘the criminal was tied up . . . a pot was turned upside down on his buttocks . . . some rats were put into it . . . and they bored their way in . . .’. Seeing, hearing and responding to these stammering hesitations as signs of Lanzer’s distress, Freud provided the missing word – ‘anus’.3 He also noted that in recounting this anal rat punishment, which an army captain had told him, ‘[Lanzer’s] face took on a very strange, composite expression. I could only interpret it as one of horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware’, pleasure, it turned out, in horror at the idea of the rat punishment being inflicted on ‘the lady whom he admired’.4