Freud - Complete Works (348 page)

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2019

   His anxiety, then, corresponded
to repressed longing. But it was not the same thing as the longing:
the repression must be taken into account too. Longing can be
completely transformed into satisfaction if it is presented with
the object longed for. Therapy of that kind is no longer effective
in dealing with anxiety. The anxiety remains even when the longing
can be satisfied. It can no longer be completely retransformed into
libido; there is something that keeps the libido back under
repression.¹ This was shown to be so in the case of Hans on
the occasion of his next walk, when his mother went with him. He
was with his mother, and yet he still suffered from anxiety - that
is to say, from an unsatisfied longing for her. It is true that the
anxiety was less; for he did allow himself to be induced to go for
the walk, whereas he had obliged the nursemaid to turn back. Nor is
a street quite the right place for ‘coaxing’, or
whatever else this young lover may have wanted. But his anxiety had
stood the test; and the next thing for it to do was to find an
object. It was on this walk that he first expressed a fear that a
horse would bite him. Where did the material for this phobia come
from?  Probably from the complexes, as yet unknown to us,
which had contributed to the repression and were keeping under
repression his libidinal feelings towards his mother. That is an
unsolved problem, and we shall now have to follow the development
of the case in order to arrive at its solution. Hans’s father
has already given us certain clues, probably trustworthy ones, such
as that Hans had always observed horses with interest on account of
their large widdlers, that he had supposed that his mother must
have a widdler like a horse, and so on. We might thus be led to
think that the horse was merely a substitute for his mother. But if
so, what would be the meaning of his being afraid in the evening
that a horse would come into the room?  A small boy’s
foolish fears, it will be said. But a neurosis never says foolish
things, any more than a dream. When we cannot understand something,
we always fall back on abuse. An excellent way of making a task
lighter.

  
¹
To speak quite frankly, this is actually
the criterion according to which we decide whether such feelings of
mingled apprehension and longing are normal or not: we begin to
call them ‘pathological anxiety’ from the moment at
which they can no longer be relieved by the attainment of the
object longed for.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2020

   There is another point in regard
to which we must avoid giving way to this temptation. Hans admitted
that every night before going to sleep he amused himself with
playing with his penis. ‘Ah!’ the family doctor will be
inclined to say, ‘now we have it. The child masturbated:
hence his pathological anxiety.’ But gently. That the child
was getting pleasure for himself by masturbating does not by any
means explain his anxiety; on the contrary, it makes it more
problematical than ever. States of anxiety are not produced by
masturbation or by getting satisfaction in any shape. Moreover, we
may presume that Hans, who was now four and three-quarters, had
been indulging in this pleasure every evening for at least a year
(see 
p. 2003
). And we shall find
that at this moment he was actually engaged in a struggle to break
himself of the habit - a state of things which fits in much better
with repression and the generation of anxiety.

   We must say a word, too, on
behalf of Hans’s excellent and devoted mother. His father
accuses her, not without some show of justice, of being responsible
for the outbreak of the child’s neurosis, on account of her
excessive display of affection for him and her too frequent
readiness to take him into her bed. We might as easily blame her
for having precipitated the process of repression by her energetic
rejection of his advances (‘that’d be piggish’).
But she had a predestined part to play, and her position was a hard
one.

   I arranged with Hans’s
father that he should tell the boy that all this business about
horses was a piece of nonsense and nothing more. The truth was, his
father was to say, that he was very fond of his mother and wanted
to be taken into her bed. The reason he was afraid of horses now
was that he had taken so much interest in their widdlers. He
himself had noticed that it was not right to be so very much
preoccupied with widdlers, even with his own, and he was quite
right in thinking this. I further suggested to his father that he
should begin giving Hans some enlightenment in the matter of sex
knowledge. The child’s past behaviour justified us in
assuming that his libido was attached to a wish to see his
mother’s widdler; so I proposed to his father that he should
take away this aim from Hans by informing him that his mother and
all other female beings (as he could see from Hanna) had no widdler
at all. This last piece of enlightenment was to be given him on a
suitable occasion when it had been led up to by some question or
some chance remark on Hans’s part.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2021

   The next batch of news about Hans
covers the period from March 1st to March 17th. The interval of
more than a month will be accounted for directly.

   ‘After Hans had been
enlightened,¹ there followed a fairly quiet period, during
which he could be induced without any particular difficulty to go
for his daily walk in the Stadtpark. His fear of horses became
transformed more and more into a compulsion to look at them. He
said: "I have to look at horses, and then I’m
frightened."

   ‘After an attack of
influenza, which kept him in bed for two weeks, his phobia
increased again so much that he could not be induced to go out, or
at any rate no more than on to the balcony. Every Sunday he went
with me to Lainz,² because on that day there is not much
traffic in the streets, and it is only a short way to the station.
On one occasion in Lainz he refused to go for a walk outside the
garden because there was a carriage standing in front of it. After
another week which he has had to spend indoors because he has had
his tonsils cut, the phobia has grown very much worse again. He
goes out on to the balcony, it is true, but not for a walk. As soon
as he gets to the street door he hurriedly turns round.

   ‘On Sunday, March 1st, the
following conversation took place on the way to the station. I was
once more trying to explain to him that horses do not bite.
He
: "But white horses bite. There’s a white horse
at Gmunden that bites. If you hold your finger to it it
bites." (I was struck by his saying "finger" instead
of "hand".) He then told me the following story, which I
give here in a connected form: "When Lizzi had to go away,
there was a cart with a white horse in front of her house, to take
her luggage to the station." (Lizzi, he tells me, was a little
girl who lived in a neighbouring house.) "Her father was
standing near the horse, and the horse turned its head round (to
touch him), and he said to Lizzi: ‘
Don’t put your
finger to the white horse or it’ll bite you
’"
Upon this I said: "I say, it strikes me that it isn’t a
horse you mean, but a widdler, that one mustn’t put
one’s hand to."

  
¹
As to the meaning of his anxiety; not yet
as to women having no widdlers.

  
²
A suburb of Vienna where Hans’s
grandparents lived.

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2022

   ‘
He
: "But a
widdler doesn’t bite."

   ‘
I
: "Perhaps it
does, though." He then went on eagerly to try and prove to me
that it really was a white horse.¹

   ‘On March 2nd, as he again
showed signs of being afraid, I said to him: "Do you know
what? This nonsense of yours" (that is how he speaks of his
phobia) "will get better if you go for more walks. It’s
so bad now because you haven’t been able to go out because
you were ill."

   ‘
He
: "Oh no,
it’s so bad because I still put my hand to my widdler every
night."'

   Doctor and patient, father and
son, were therefore at one in ascribing the chief share in the
pathogenesis of Hans’s present condition to his habit of
masturbating. Indications were not wanting, however, of the
presence of other significant factors.

   ‘On March 3rd we got in a
new maid, whom he is particularly pleased with. She lets him ride
on her back while she cleans the floor, and so he always calls her
"my horse", and holds on to her dress with cries of
"Gee-up". On about March 10th he said to this new
nursemaid: "If you do such-and-such a thing you’ll have
to undress altogether, and take off your chemise even." (He
meant this as a punishment, but it is easy to recognize the wish
behind it.)

   ‘
She
: "And
what’d be the harm? I’d just say to myself I
haven’t got any money to spend on clothes."

   ‘
He
: "Why,
it’d be shameful. People’d see your widdler."
‘

   Here we have the same curiosity
again, but directed on to a new object, and (appropriately to a
period of repression) cloaked under a moralizing purpose.

   ‘On March 13th in the
morning I said to Hans: "You know, if you don’t put your
hand to your widdler any more, this nonsense of yours’ll soon
get better."

  
¹
Hans’s father had no reason to doubt
that it was a real event that the boy was describing. -I may also
mention that the sensations of itching in the glans penis, which
lead children to touch their genitals, are usually described by
them in the phrase ‘
Es beisst mich
’
[‘I’m itching’, literally ‘it bites
me’].

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2023

   ‘
Hans
: "But I
don’t put my hand to my widdler any more."

   ‘
I
: "But you
still want to."

   ‘
Hans
: "Yes, I
do. But wanting’s not doing, and doing’s not
wanting." (!!)

   ‘
I
: "Well, but
to prevent your wanting to, this evening you’re going to have
a bag to sleep in."

   ‘After this we went out in
front of the house. Hans was still afraid, but his spirits were
visibly raised by the prospect of having his struggles made easier
for him, and he said: "Oh, if I have a bag to sleep in my
nonsense’ll have gone to-morrow." And, in fact, he was
much
less afraid of horses, and was fairly calm when
vehicles drove past.

   ‘Hans had promised to go
with me to Lainz the next Sunday, March 15th. He resisted at first,
but finally went with me all the same. He obviously felt all right
in the street, as there was not much traffic, and said: "How
sensible! God’s done away with horses now." On the way I
explained to him that his sister has not got a widdler like him.
Little girls and women, I said, have no widdlers: Mummy has none,
Anna has none, and so on.

   ‘
Hans
: "Have
you got a widdler?"

   ‘
I
: "Of course.
Why, what do you suppose?"

   ‘
Hans
(after a
pause): "But how do little girls widdle, if they have no
widdlers?"

   ‘
I
: "They
don’t have widdlers like yours. Haven’t you noticed
already, when Hanna was being given her bath?"

   ‘All day long he was in
very high spirits, went tobogganing, and so on. It was only towards
evening that he fell into low spirits again and seemed to be afraid
of horses.

   ‘That evening his attack of
nerves and his need for being coaxed with were less pronounced than
on previous days. Next day his mother took him with her into town
and he was very much frightened in the streets. The day after, he
stopped at home and was very cheerful. Next morning he woke up in a
fright at about six o’clock. When he was asked what was the
matter he said: "I put my finger to my widdler just a very
little. I saw Mummy quite naked in her chemise, and she let me see
her widdler. I showed Grete,¹ my Grete, what Mummy was doing,
and showed her my widdler. Then I took my hand away from my widdler
quick." When I objected that he could only mean "in her
chemise"
or
"quite naked", Hans said:
"She was in her chemise, but the chemise was so short that I
saw her widdler."'

   This was none of it a dream, but
a masturbatory phantasy, which was, however, equivalent to a dream.
What he made his mother do was evidently intended as a piece of
self-justification: ‘If Mummy shows her widdler, I may
too.’

   We can gather two things from
this phantasy: first, that his mother’s reproof had produced
a powerful result on him at the time it was made, and secondly,
that the enlightenment he had been given to the effect that women
have no widdlers was not accepted by him at first. He regretted
that it should be so, and in his phantasy he stuck to his former
view. He may also perhaps have had his reasons for refusing to
believe his father for the moment.

  
¹
‘Grete is one of the little girls at
Gmunden about whom Hans is having phantasies just now; he talks and
plays with her.’

Analysis Of A Phobia In A Five-Year-Old Boy

2024

  
Weekly report from
Hans’s father
: ‘My dear Professor, I enclose the
continuation of Hans’s story - quite an interesting
instalment. I shall perhaps take the liberty of calling upon you
during your consulting hours on Monday and if possible of bringing
Hans with me - assuming that he will come. I said to him to-day:
"Will you come with me on Monday to see the Professor, who can
take away your nonsense for you?"