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Lear offers this brief selection from Freud's "Notes on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis," SE 10:209 (Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul, Harvard University Press, 1998, Note 17, at p. 313):

"Things soon reached a point at which, in his dreams, his waking phantasies, and his associations, he began heaping the grossest and filthiest abuse upon me and my family, though in his deliberate actions he never treated me with anything but the greatest respect. His demeanor as he repeated these insults to me was that of a man in despair. "How can a gentleman like you, sir," he used to ask, "let yourself be abused in this way by a low, good-for-nothing fellow like me? You ought to turn me out: that's all I deserve." While he talked like this, he would get up from the sofa and roam about the room, ---a habit which he explained at first as being due to delicacy of feeling: he could not bring himself, he said, to utter such horrible things while he was lying there so comfortably. But soon he himself found a more cogent explanation, namely, that he was avoidingmy proximity for fear of my giving him a beating. If he stayed on the sofa he behaved like someone in desperate terror trying to save himself from castigations of terrible violence; he would bury his head in his hands, cover his face with his arm, jump up suddenly and rush away, his features distorted with pain, and so on. He recalled that his father had had a passionate temper, and sometimes in his violence had not know where to stop."

Lear, ibid., at p. 90

This is the case in which Lear disagrees with Freud's acceptance of this rational explanation the Rat Man offers of his cringing. Lear suggests that the Rat Man comes up with this explanation because of his need to know, to show his behavior to be "rational." But Lear points out that there is no rational basis for the Rat Man to fear Freud, suggesting that the rational explanation for the behavior just gets tacked on to the "acting out."

This would seem to suggest that many of our rationalizations are "tacked on" after the fact, and given credence simply because the concept of "knowingness," or having a rational explanation for everything, has so permeated our culture.

Lear suggests that the Rat Man's acting out is not based on any rational cause, but is the "acting out" of conflict at a non-rational level. Lear rejects the idea that there are two minds, one conscious, and one unconscious, insisting that such a positing of two minds credits us with more "rational" structure than we, in fact, have. Lear suggests that there is a non-rational component to our minds, leading us to act out behaviors for which there is no rational explanation in the unconscious.

Applied to the structural violence of institutions this would suggest that much about institutions is also not rational, but the mere acting out of transferences occurring in the behaviors of the clerks who comprise the institution.