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The way in which the terms of payment influence transference, counter-transference, and the psychoanalytic cure, and the way in which this becomes interweaved with the issues with which the patient is concerned and his/her symptoms, is a question that requires attention in any psychoanalytic cure. The author chooses here to broach this complex subject in the light of Freud’s princeps case of the Rat Man. This case has a lot to tell us, because we have access to Freud’s notes from the sessions that took place during the first four months of the cure. The published case does not specify the fact that it was the patient’s mother who paid for the treatment with money inherited from the deceased father (which was in fact the mother’s money, because it was she who was wealthy before the marriage, not the father). Furthermore, the patient had renounced the inheritance for neurotic reasons. The author explores the issue of the circulation of money in the patient’s obsessive scenarios, and the effects of the payment procedures on the psychoanalytic cure.