Freud - Complete Works (359 page)

   Hans’s father grasped the
nature of this wishful phantasy, and did not hesitate a moment as
to the only interpretation it could bear.

   ‘
I
: "He gave
you a
bigger
widdler and a
bigger
behind."

   ‘
Hans
:
"Yes."

   ‘
I
: "Like
Daddy’s; because you’d like to be Daddy."

   ‘
Hans
: "Yes,
and I’d like to have a moustache like yours and hairs like
yours." (He pointed to the hairs on my chest.)

   ‘In the light of this, we
may review the interpretation of Hans’s earlier phantasy to
the effect that the plumber had come and unscrewed the bath and had
stuck a borer into his stomach. The big bath meant a
"behind", the borer or screwdriver was (as was explained
at the time) a widdler.¹ The two phantasies are identical.
Moreover, a new light is thrown upon Hans’s fear of the big
bath. (This, by the way, has already diminished.) He dislikes his
"behind" being too small for the big bath.’

   In the course of the next few
days Hans’s mother wrote to me more than once to express her
joy at the little boy’s recovery.

  
¹
Perhaps, too, the word ‘borer’
[‘
Bohrer
’] was not chosen without regard for its
connection with ‘born’ [‘
geboren
’]
and ‘birth’ [‘
Geburt
’]. If so, the
child could have made no distinction between ‘bored’
[‘
gebohrt
’] and ‘born’
[‘
geboren
’]. I accept this suggestion, made by
an experienced fellow-worker, but I am not in a position to say
whether we have before us here a deep and universal connection
between the two ideas or merely the employment of a verbal
coincidence peculiar to German. Prometheus (Pramantha), the creator
of man, is also etymologically ‘the borer’. (Cf.
Abraham,
Traum und Mythus
, 1909.)

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

2085

   A week later came a postscript
from Hans’s father.

   ‘My dear Professor, I
should like to make the following additions to Hans’s case
history:

   ‘(1) The remission after he
had been given his first piece of enlightenment was not so complete
as I may have represented it. It is true that Hans went for walks;
but only under compulsion and in a state of great anxiety. Once he
went with me as far as the Hauptzollamt station, from which our
house can still be seen, but could not be induced to go any
farther.

   ‘(2) As regards
"raspberry syrup" and "a gun for shooting
with". Hans is given raspberry syrup when he is constipated.
He also frequently confuses the words "shooting" and
"shitting".¹

   ‘(3) Hans was about four
years old when he was moved out of our bedroom into a room of his
own.

   ‘(4) A trace of his
disorder still persists, though it is no longer in the shape of
fear but only in that of the normal instinct for asking questions.
The questions are mostly concerned with what things are made of
(trams, machines, etc.), who makes things, etc. Most of his
questions are characterized by the fact that Hans asks them
although he has already answered them himself. He only wants to
make sure. Once when he had tired me out with his questions and I
had said to him: "Do you think I can answer every question you
ask?" he replied: "Well, I thought as you knew that about
the horse you’d know this too."

   ‘(5) Hans only refers to
his illness now as a matter of past history - "at the time
when I had my nonsense".

   ‘(6) An unsolved residue
remains behind; for Hans keeps cudgelling his brains to discover
what a father has to do with his child, since it is the mother who
brings it into the world. This can be seen from his questions, as,
for instance: "I belong to
you
, too, don’t
I?" (meaning, not only to his mother). It is not clear to him
in what way he belongs to me. On the other hand, I have no direct
evidence of his having, as you suppose, overheard his parents in
the act of intercourse.

   ‘(7) In presenting the case
one ought perhaps to insist upon the violence of his anxiety.
Otherwise it might be said that the boy would have gone out for
walks soon enough if he had been given a sound
thrashing.’

  
¹
[In German ‘
schiessen
’
and ‘
scheissen
’.]

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

2086

   In conclusion let me add these
words. With Hans’s last phantasy the anxiety which arose from
his castration complex was also overcome, and his painful
expectations were given a happier turn. Yes, the Doctor (the
plumber)
did
come, he
did
take away his penis, - but
only to give him a bigger one in exchange for it. For the rest, our
young investigator has merely come somewhat early upon the
discovery that all knowledge is patchwork, and that each step
forward leaves an unsolved residue behind.

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

2087

III

DISCUSSION

   I shall now proceed to examine
this observation of the development and resolution of a phobia in a
boy under five years of age, and I shall have to do so from three
points of view. In the first place I shall consider how far it
supports the assertions which I put forward in my
Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905
d
). Secondly, I shall
consider to what extent it can contribute towards our understanding
of this very frequent form of disorder. And thirdly, I shall
consider whether it can be made to shed any light upon the mental
life of children or to afford any criticism of our educational
aims.

(I)

   My impression is that the picture
of a child’s sexual life presented in this observation of
little Hans agrees very well with the account I gave of it (basing
my views upon psycho-analytic examinations of adults) in my
Three Essays
. But before going into the details of this
agreement I must deal with two objections which will be raised
against my making use of the present analysis for this purpose. The
first objection is to the effect that Hans was not a normal child,
but (as events - the illness itself, in fact - showed) had a
predisposition to neurosis, and was a young
‘degenerate’; it would be illegitimate, therefore, to
apply to other, normal children conclusions which might perhaps be
true of him. I shall postpone consideration of this objection,
since it only limits the value of the observation, and does not
completely nullify it. According to the second and more
uncompromising objection, an analysis of a child conducted by his
father, who went to work instilled with
my
theoretical views
and infected with
my
prejudices, must be entirely devoid of
any objective worth. A child, it will be said, is necessarily
highly suggestible, and in regard to no one, perhaps, more than to
his own father; he will allow anything to be forced upon him, out
of gratitude to his father for taking so much notice of him; none
of his assertions can have any evidential value, and everything he
produces in the way of associations, phantasies, and dreams will
naturally take the direction into which they are being urged by
every possible means. Once more, in short, the whole thing is
simply ‘suggestion’ - the only difference being that in
the case of a child it can be unmasked much more easily than in
that of an adult.

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

2088

   A singular thing. I can remember,
when I first began to meddle in the conflict of scientific opinions
twenty-two years ago, with what derision the older generation of
neurologists and psychiatrists of those days received assertions
about suggestion and its effects. Since then the situation has
fundamentally changed. The former aversion has been converted into
an only too ready acceptance; and this has happened not only as a
consequence of the impression which the work of Liébeault
and Bernheim and their pupils could not fail to create in the
course of these two decades, but also because it has since been
discovered how great an economy of thought can be effected by the
use of the catchword ‘suggestion’. Nobody knows and
nobody cares what suggestion is, where it comes from, or when it
arises, - it is enough that everything awkward in the region of
psychology can be labelled ‘suggestion’. I do not share
the view which is at present fashionable that assertions made by
children are invariably arbitrary and untrustworthy. The arbitrary
has no existence in mental life. The untrustworthiness of the
assertions of children is due to the predominance of their
imagination, just as the untrustworthiness of the assertions of
grown-up people is due to the predominance of their prejudices. For
the rest, even children do not lie without a reason, and on the
whole they are more inclined to a love of truth than are their
elders. If we were to reject little Hans’s statements root
and branch we should certainly be doing him a grave injustice. On
the contrary, we can quite clearly distinguish from one another the
occasions on which he was falsifying the facts or keeping them back
under the compelling force of a resistance, the occasions on which,
being undecided himself, he agreed with his father (so that what he
said must not be taken as evidence), and the occasions on which,
freed from every pressure, he burst into a flood of information
about what was really going on inside him and about things which
until then no one but himself had known. Statements made by adults
offer no greater certainty. It is a regrettable fact that no
account of a psycho-analysis can reproduce the impressions received
by the analyst as he conducts it, and that a final sense of
conviction can never be obtained from reading about it but only
from directly experiencing it. But this disability attaches in an
equal degree to analyses of adults.

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

2089

   Little Hans is described by his
parents as a cheerful, straightforward child, and so he should have
been, considering the education given him by his parents, which
consisted essentially in the omission of our usual educational
sins. So long as he was able to carry on his researches in a state
of happy
naïveté
, without a suspicion of the
conflicts which were soon to arise out of them, he kept nothing
back; and the observations made during the period before the phobia
admit of no doubt or demur. It was with the outbreak of the illness
and during the analysis that discrepancies began to make their
appearance between what he said and what he thought; and this was
partly because unconscious material, which he was unable to master
all at once, was forcing itself upon him, and partly because the
content of his thoughts provoked reservations on account of his
relation to his parents. It is my unbiased opinion that these
difficulties, too, turned out no greater than in many analyses of
adults.

   It is true that during the
analysis Hans had to be told many things that he could not say
himself, that he had to be presented with thoughts which he had so
far shown no signs of possessing, and that his attention had to be
turned in the direction from which his father was expecting
something to come. This detracts from the evidential value of the
analysis; but the procedure is the same in every case. For a
psycho-analysis is not an impartial scientific investigation, but a
therapeutic measure. Its essence is not to prove anything, but
merely to alter something. In a psycho-analysis the physician
always gives his patient (sometimes to a greater and some times to
a less extent) the conscious anticipatory ideas by the help of
which he is put in a position to recognize and to grasp the
unconscious material. For there are some patients who need more of
such assistance and some who need less; but there are none who get
through without some of it. Slight disorders may perhaps be brought
to an end by the subject’s unaided efforts, but never a
neurosis - a thing which has set itself up against the ego as an
element alien to it. To get the better of such an element another
person must be brought in, and in so far as that other person can
be of assistance the neurosis will be curable. If it is in the very
nature of any neurosis to turn away from the ‘other
person’ - and this seems to be one of the characteristics of
the states grouped together under the name of dementia praecox -
then for that very reason such a state will be incurable by any
efforts of ours. It is true that a child, on account of the small
development of his intellectual systems, requires especially
energetic assistance. But, after all, the information which the
physician gives his patient is itself derived in its turn from
analytical experience; and indeed it is sufficiently convincing if,
at the cost of this intervention by the physician, we are enabled
to discover the structure of the pathogenic material and
simultaneously to dissipate it.

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

2090

   And yet, even during the
analysis, the small patient gave evidence of enough independence to
acquit him upon the charge of ‘suggestion’. Like all
other children, he applied his childish sexual theories to the
material before him without having received any encouragement to do
so. These theories are extremely remote from the adult mind.
Indeed, in this instance I actually omitted to warn Hans’s
father that the boy would be bound to approach the subject of
childbirth by way of the excretory complex. This negligence on my
part, though it led to an obscure phase in the analysis, was
nevertheless the means of producing a good piece of evidence of the
genuineness and independence of Hans’s mental processes. He
suddenly became occupied with ‘lumf’, without his
father, who is supposed to have been practising suggestion upon
him, having the least idea how he had arrived at that subject or
what was going to come of it. Nor can his father be saddled with
any responsibility for the production of the two plumber
phantasies, which arose out of Hans’s early acquired
‘castration complex’. And I must here confess that, out
of theoretical interest, I entirely concealed from Hans’s
father my expectation that there would turn out to be some such
connection, so as not to interfere with the value of a piece of
evidence such as does not often come within one’s grasp.

   If I went more deeply into the
details of the analysis I could produce plenty more evidence of
Hans’s independence of ‘suggestion’; but I shall
break off the discussion of this preliminary objection at this
point. I am aware that even with this analysis I shall not succeed
in convincing any one who will not let himself be convinced, and I
shall proceed with my discussion of the case for the benefit of
those readers who are already convinced of the objective reality of
unconscious pathogenic material. And I do this with the agreeable
assurance that the number of such readers is steadily
increasing.

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

2091

   The first trait in little Hans
which can be regarded as part of his sexual life was a quite
peculiarly lively interest in his ‘widdler’ - an organ
deriving its name from that one of its two functions which,
scarcely the less important of the two, is not to be eluded in the
nursery. This interest aroused in him the spirit of enquiry, and he
thus discovered that the presence or absence of a widdler made it
possible to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects. He
assumed that all animate objects were like himself, and possessed
this important bodily organ; he observed that it was present in the
larger animals, suspected that this was so too in both his parents,
and was not deterred by the evidence of his own eyes from
authenticating the fact in his new-born sister. One might almost
say that it would have been too shattering a blow to his
‘
Weltanschauung
’ if he had had to make up his
mind to forgo the presence of this organ in a being similar to him;
it would have been as though it were being torn away from himself.
It was probably on this account that a threat of his
mother’s, which was concerned precisely with the loss of his
widdler, was hastily dismissed from his thoughts and only succeeded
in making its effects apparent at a later period. The reason for
his mother’s intervention had been that he used to like
giving himself feelings of pleasure by touching his member: the
little boy had begun to practise the commonest - and most normal -
form of auto-erotic sexual activity.

   The pleasure which a person takes
in his own sexual organ may become associated with scopophilia (or
sexual pleasure in looking) in its active and passive forms, in a
manner which has been very aptly described by Alfred Adler (1908)
as ‘confluence of instincts’. So little Hans began to
try to get a sight of other people’s widdlers; his sexual
curiosity developed, and at the same time he liked to exhibit his
own widdler. One of his dreams, dating from the beginning of his
period of repression, expressed a wish that one of his little girl
friends should assist him in widdling, that is, that she should
share the spectacle. The dream shows, therefore, that up till then
this wish had subsisted unrepressed, and later information
confirmed the fact that he had been in the habit of gratifying it.
The active side of his sexual scopophilia soon became associated in
him with a definite theme. He repeatedly expressed both to his
father and his mother his regret that he had never yet seen their
widdlers; and it was probably the need
for making a
comparison
which impelled him to do this. The ego is always the
standard by which one measures the external world; one learns to
understand it by means of a constant comparison with oneself. Hans
had observed that large animals had widdlers that were
correspondingly larger than his; he consequently suspected that the
same was true of his parents, and was anxious to make sure of this.
His mother, he thought, must certainly have a widdler ‘like a
horse’. He was then prepared with the comforting reflection
that his widdler would grow with him. It was as though the
child’s wish to be bigger had been concentrated on his
genitals.

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

2092

   Thus in little Hans’s
sexual constitution the genital zone was from the outset the one
among his erotogenic zones which afforded him the most intense
pleasure. The only other similar pleasure of which he gave evidence
was excretory pleasure, the pleasure attached to the orifices
through which micturition and evacuation of the bowels are
effected. In his final phantasy of bliss, with which his illness
was overcome, he imagined he had children, whom he took to the
W.C., whom he made to widdle, whose behinds he wiped - for whom, in
short, he did ‘everything one can do with children’; it
therefore seems impossible to avoid the assumption that during the
period when he himself had been looked after as an infant these
same performances had been the source of pleasurable sensations for
him. He had obtained this pleasure from his erotogenic zones with
the help of the person who had looked after him - his mother, in
fact; and thus the pleasure already pointed the way to
object-choice. But it is just possible that at a still earlier date
he had been in the habit of giving himself this pleasure
auto-erotically - that he had been one of those children who like
retaining their excreta till they can derive a voluptuous sensation
from their evacuation. I say no more than that it is possible,
because the matter was not cleared up in the analysis; the
‘making a row with the legs’ (kicking about), of which
he was so much frightened later on, points in that direction. But
in any case these sources of pleasure had no particularly striking
importance with Hans, as they so often have with other children. He
early became clean in his habits, and neither bed-wetting nor
diurnal incontinence played any part during his first years; no
trace was observed in him of any inclination to play with his
excrement, a propensity which is so revolting in adults, and which
commonly makes its reappearance at the termination of processes of
psychical involution.