Freud - Complete Works (362 page)

  
¹
Hans’s admiration of his
father’s neck later on would fit in with this.

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

2104

   Immediately after the giraffe
story Hans produced two minor phantasies: one of his forcing his
way into a forbidden space at Schönbrunn, and the other of his
smashing a railway-carriage window on the Stadtbahn. In each case
the punishable nature of the action was emphasized, and in each his
father appeared as an accomplice. Unluckily his father failed to
interpret either of these phantasies, so that Hans himself gained
nothing from telling them. In an analysis, however, a thing which
has not been understood inevitably reappears; like an unlaid ghost,
it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell
broken.

   There are no difficulties in the
way of our understanding these two criminal phantasies. They
belonged to Hans’s complex of taking possession of his
mother. Some kind of vague notion was struggling in the
child’s mind of something that he might do with his mother by
means of which his taking possession of her would be consummated;
for this elusive thought he found certain pictorial
representations, which had in common the qualities of being violent
and forbidden, and the content of which strikes us as fitting in
most remarkably well with the hidden truth. We can only say that
they were symbolic phantasies of intercourse, and it was no
irrelevant detail that his father was represented as sharing in his
actions: ‘I should like’, he seems to have been saying,
‘to be doing something with my mother, something forbidden; I
do not know what it is, but I do know that you are doing it
too.’

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

2105

   The giraffe phantasy strengthened
a conviction which had already begun to form in my mind when Hans
expressed his fear that ‘the horse’ll come into the
room’; and I thought the right moment had now arrived for
informing him that he was afraid of his father because he himself
nourished jealous and hostile wishes against him - for it was
essential to postulate this much with regard to his unconscious
impulses. In telling him this, I had partly interpreted his fear of
horses for him: the horse must be his father - whom he had good
internal reasons for fearing. Certain details of which Hans had
shown he was afraid, the black on horses’ mouths and the
things in front of their eyes (the moustaches and eyeglasses which
are the privilege of a grown-up man), seemed to me to have been
directly transposed from his father on to the horses.

   By enlightening Hans on this
subject I had cleared away his most powerful resistance against
allowing his unconscious thoughts to be made conscious; for his
father was himself acting as his physician. The worst of the attack
was now over; there was a plentiful flow of material; the little
patient summoned up courage to describe the details of his phobia,
and soon began to take an active share in the conduct of the
analysis.¹

  
¹
Even in analyses in which the physician and
the patient are strangers, fear of the father plays one of the most
important parts as a resistance against the reproduction of the
unconscious pathogenic material. Resistances are sometimes in the
nature of ‘motifs’. But sometimes, as in the present
instance, one piece of the unconscious material is capable from its
actual
content
of operating as an inhibition against the
reproduction of another piece.

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

2106

   It was only then that we learnt
what the objects and impressions were of which Hans was afraid. He
was not only afraid of horses biting him - he was soon silent upon
that point - but also of carts, of furniture-vans, and of buses
(their common quality being, as presently became clear, that they
were all heavily loaded), of horses that started moving, of horses
that looked big and heavy, and of horses that drove quickly. The
meaning of these specifications was explained by Hans himself: he
was afraid of horses
falling down
, and consequently
incorporated in his phobia everything that seemed likely to
facilitate their falling down.

   It not at all infrequently
happens that it is only after doing a certain amount of
psycho-analytic work with a patient that an analyst can succeed in
learning the actual content of a phobia, the precise form of words
of an obsessional impulse, and so on. Repression has not only
descended upon the unconscious complexes, but it is continually
attacking their derivatives as well, and even prevents the patient
from becoming aware of the products of the disease itself. The
analyst thus finds himself in the position, curious for a doctor,
of coming to the help of a disease, and of procuring it its due of
attention. But only those who entirely misunderstand the nature of
psycho-analysis will lay stress upon this phase of the work and
suppose that on its account harm is likely to be done by analysis.
The fact is that you must catch your thief before you can hang him,
and that it requires some expenditure of labour to get securely
hold of the pathological structures - at the destruction of which
the treatment is aimed.

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

2107

   I have already remarked in the
course of my running commentary on the case history that it is most
instructive to plunge in this way into the details of a phobia, and
thus arrive at a conviction of the secondary nature of the relation
between the anxiety and its objects. It is this that accounts for
phobias being at once so curiously diffuse and so strictly
conditioned. It is evident that the material for the particular
disguises which Hans’s fear adopted was collected from the
impressions to which he was all day long exposed owing to the Head
Customs House being situated on the opposite side of the street. In
this connection, too, he showed signs of an impulse - though it was
now inhibited by his anxiety - to play with the loads on the carts,
with the packages, casks and boxes, like the street-boys.

   It was at this stage of the
analysis that he recalled the event, insignificant in itself, which
immediately preceded the outbreak of the illness and may no doubt
be regarded as the precipitating cause of its outbreak. He went for
a walk with his mother, and saw a bus-horse fall down and kick
about with its feet. This made a great impression on him. He was
terrified, and thought the horse was dead; and from that time on he
thought that all horses would fall down. His father pointed out to
him that when he saw the horse fall down he must have thought of
him, his father, and have wished that he might fall down in the
same way and be dead. Hans did not dispute this interpretation; and
a little while later he played a game consisting of biting his
father, and so showed that he accepted the theory of his having
identified his father with the horse he was afraid of. From that
time forward his behaviour to his father was unconstrained and
fearless, and in fact a trifle overbearing. Nevertheless his fear
of horses persisted; nor was it yet clear through what chain of
associations the horse’s falling down had stirred up his
unconscious wishes.

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

2108

   Let me summarize the results that
had so far been reached. Behind the fear to which Hans first gave
expression, the fear of a horse biting him, we had discovered a
more deeply seated fear, the fear of horses falling down; and both
kinds of horses, the biting horse and the falling horse, had been
shown to represent his father, who was going to punish him for the
evil wishes he was nourishing against him. Meanwhile the analysis
had moved away from the subject of his mother.

   Quite unexpectedly, and certainly
without any prompting from his father, Hans now began to be
occupied with the ‘lumf’ complex, and to show disgust
at things that reminded him of evacuating his bowels. His father,
who was reluctant to go with him along that line, pushed on with
the analysis through thick and thin in the direction in which he
wanted to go. He elicited from Hans the recollection of an event at
Gmunden, the impression of which lay concealed behind that of the
falling bus-horse. While they were playing at horses, Fritzl, the
playmate of whom he was so fond, but at the same time, perhaps, his
rival with his many girl friends, had hit his foot against a stone
and had fallen down, and his foot had bled. Seeing the bus-horse
fall had reminded him of this accident. It deserves to be noticed
that Hans, who was at the moment concerned with other things, began
by denying that Fritzl had fallen down (though this, was the event
which formed the connection between the two scenes) and only
admitted it at a later stage of the analysis. It is especially
interesting, however, to observe the way in which the
transformation of Hans’s libido into anxiety was projected on
to the principal object of his phobia, on to horses. Horses
interested him the most of all the large animals; playing at horses
was his favourite game with the other children. I had a suspicion -
and this was confirmed by Hans’s father when I asked him -
that the first person who had served Hans as a horse must have been
his father; and it was this that had enabled him to regard Fritzl
as a substitute for his father when the accident happened at
Gmunden. When repression had set in and brought a revulsion of
feeling along with it, horses, which had till then been associated
with so much pleasure, were necessarily turned into objects of
fear.

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

2109

   But, as we have already said, it
was owing to the intervention of Hans’s father that this last
important discovery was made of the way in which the precipitating
cause of the illness had operated. Hans himself was occupied with
his lumf interests, and thither at last we must follow him. We
learn that formerly Hans had been in the habit of insisting upon
accompanying his mother to the W. C., and that he had revived this
custom with his friend Berta at a time when she was filling his
mother’s place, until the fact became known and he was
forbidden to do so. Pleasure taken in looking on while some one one
loves performs the natural functions is once more a
‘confluence of instincts’, of which we have already
noticed an instance in Hans. In the end his father went into the
lumf symbolism, and recognized that there was an analogy between a
heavily loaded cart and a body loaded with faeces, between the way
in which a cart drives out through a gateway and the way in which
faeces leave the body, and so on.

   By this time, however, the
position occupied by Hans in the analysis had become very different
from what it had been at an earlier stage. Previously, his father
had been able to tell him in advance what was coming, while Hans
had merely followed his lead and come trotting after; but now it
was Hans who was forging ahead, so rapidly and steadily that his
father found it difficult to keep up with him. Without any warning,
as it were, Hans produced a new phantasy: the plumber unscrewed the
bath in which Hans was, and then stuck him in the stomach with his
big borer. Henceforward the material brought up in the analysis far
outstripped our powers of understanding it. It was not until later
that it was possible to guess that this was a remoulding of a
phantasy of procreation
, distorted by anxiety. The big bath
of water, in which Hans imagined himself, was his mother’s
womb; the ‘borer’, which his father had from the
first recognized as a penis, owed its mention to its connection
with ‘being born’. The interpretation that we are
obliged to give to the phantasy will of course sound very curious:
‘With your big penis you "bored" me’ (i.e.
‘gave birth to me’) ‘and put me in my
mother’s womb.’ For the moment, however, the phantasy
eluded interpretation, and merely served Hans as a starting point
from which to continue giving information.

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

2110

   Hans showed fear of being given a
bath in the big bath; and this fear was once more a composite one.
One part of it escaped us as yet, but the other part could at once
be elucidated in connection with his baby sister having her bath.
Hans confessed to having wished that his mother might drop the
child while she was being given her bath, so that she should die.
His own anxiety while he was having his bath was a fear of
retribution for this evil wish and of being punished by the same
thing happening to him. Hans now left the subject of lumf and
passed on directly to that of his baby sister. We may well imagine
what this juxtaposition signified: nothing less, in fact, than that
little Hanna was a lumf herself - that all babies were lumfs and
were born like lumfs. We can now recognize that all furniture-vans
and drays and buses were only stork-box carts, and were only of
interest to Hans as being symbolic representations of pregnancy;
and that when a heavy or heavily loaded horse fell down he can have
seen in it only one thing - a childbirth, a delivery [‘
ein
Niederkommen
’]. Thus the falling horse was not only his
dying father but also his mother in childbirth.

   And at this point Hans gave us a
surprise, for which we were not in the very least prepared. He had
noticed his mother’s pregnancy, which had ended with the
birth of his little sister when he was three and a half years old,
and had, at any rate after the confinement, pieced the facts of the
case together - without telling any one, it is true, and perhaps
without being able to tell any one. All that could be seen at the
time was that immediately after the delivery he had taken up an
extremely sceptical attitude towards everything that might be
supposed to point to the presence of the stork.
But that - in
complete contradiction to his official speeches - he knew in his
unconscious where the baby came from and where it had been
before
, is proved beyond a shadow of doubt by the present
analysis; indeed, this is perhaps its most unassailable
feature.