The Penguin Freud Library, Vol.9: Case Histories 2: The 'Rat Man',

This volume contains the last four of Freud's six major case histories. The "Rat Man" first came to Freud in 1907, aged 29, suffering from obsessional fears and irresistible, violent impulses. The treatment lasted a year and the patient regained his mental health. Dr Schreber, sometime Appeal Court judge in Dresden, suffered from severe bouts of paranoid delusions. He was never Freud's patient and the analysis of this case was based on Shreber's autobiography. This gave Freud the opportunity of publishing his theory of the close connection between paranoia and repressed passive homosexuality - supported by Schreber's frank and detailed account of his fantasies and delusions. the "Wolf Man's" history is the longest, most complicated and the most famous of all Freud's cases. The rich young Russian patient who had suffered as a child from a hysterical fear of wolves and from religious obsessions, was treated by Freud for four-and-a-half years. In 1920 Freud published the incomplete analysis of a homosexual girl of 18. In it, female sexuality is considered far more deeply than in Freud's earlier work.