APA Dictionary of Psychology

a landmark case that Sigmund Freud described in “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” (1909). The name was applied to a patient of Freud’s, a 30-year-old lawyer whose obsessional fear of rats was traced to repressed death wishes toward his father generated by oedipal conflicts. One example of the patient’s obsession was his belief that a rat that appeared to come out of his father’s grave had eaten the corpse; another was a fantasy that a rat had been placed in his father’s anus and had eaten through his intestines. Freud’s analysis of these reactions laid the groundwork for the psychoanalytic interpretation of obsessional neurosis. See also Oedipus complex.