ABSTRACT
The compulsion to repeat dominates the lives of people who have been seduced or beaten by psychotic and psychopathic parents. Obviously not all soul murder victims are rat people, and whether all people who are preoccupied with toothed creatures and rodents have suffered actual over-stimulating experiences as children must also be subject to doubt. The rat is one of the principal symbolic mental images of cannibalism–probably by virtue of the impact on the human mind of the rat’s propensity for murdering and devouring members of its own species, of its omnivorous destructiveness, and perhaps above all of its remarkable teeth. It is among the most common of many imagos that are first of all cannibalistic: carriers of the destructive tooth. Man has had to deal continually with the rat because of its omnipresence, destructiveness, and great fecundity; the last has made the rat’s extermination necessary but ineffectual.
