O Homem dos Ratos entre Descartes e o Antigo Testamento: sobre as relações entre homem, razão e verdade em Freud

Abstract

In one of the Rat Man’s obsessions, when trying to pray and pronounce blessings, the famous patient had to deal with the intrusion of a “no”, which converted them into their opposite, i.e., into curses. When describing this phenomenon, Freud says that a böser Geist (“evil demon”) meddled in the patient’s actions, and states that he was an “inverted Balaam”. In this article, we seek to investigate these two details of the Freudian text. Firstly, we start with the Old Testament, in order to better understand the mention of Balaam, a character with certain relevance within Jewish tradition. In a second moment, we went to the Metaphysical Meditations, by Descartes; indeed, the genius malignus (“evil genius”) hypothesised by the philosopher was translated in German as böser Geist. After that, we returned to the Freudian text and reassessed the clinical case of the Rat Man, seeking to find out what relationships exist in Freud between man, reason and truth.