Appignanesi (1979) illustrates Freud's encounter with a patient he dubbed the Rat Man. The Rat Man was obsessed with a Chinese torture technique in which "a pot is filled with rats and tied upside-down on the victim's buttocks," so that the rats "gnaw their way out through the anus," (p. 103). Imagining that the torture would befall his loved ones, the Rat Man "had to follow a set of bizarre, self-imposed 'instructions,'" (p. 104). Whereas a modern-day psychiatrist would promptly issue the Rat Man anti-psychotic drugs, Freud relied only on psychoanalysis to help the patient, tracing his obsession and his behavior to childhood sexual curiosity and especially to anal fixation. The case can illustrate the power of Freud's psychoanalytic techniques, which he claimed "completely cleared" the man's neurosis (p. 110).

             Freud drew several conclusions, all based on his psychoanalytic theories. First, Freud noted that in the Rat Man, "Sexual arousal became linked with punishment and hostility against his father," (105). In his childhood the Rat Man explored his governess's private parts. His childhood fixation continued, as the Rat Man would study each night between midnight and 1 AM in anticipation of his father's return-even though his father had been dead for nine years. During those same hours, the man would look at his penis in the mirror. Freud concluded that the routine showed a simultaneous desire to "impress father with hard work," and to "defy him by 'disguised masturbation,'" (p. 107). Freud also noted that the reason why the man acts out his fears in the present is because he remains fixated at the anal stage and possesses sadistic urges, which are exemplified by the Chinese rat torture. His suppressed desire to harm loved ones and the related neurotic actions "make sense as a need to repeat something in the past.instead of remembering," (p. 110). By encouraging the Rat Man to remember and to deal with the initial repressed memory, Freud helped him to recover from the neurosis.