Freud - Complete Works (363 page)

   The most cogent evidence of this
is furnished by the phantasy (which he persisted in with so much
obstinacy, and embellished with such a wealth of detail) of how
Hanna had been with them at Gmunden the summer before her birth, of
how she had travelled there with them, and of how she had been able
to do far more then than she had a year later, after she had been
born. The effrontery with which Hans related this phantasy and the
countless extravagant lies with which he interwove it were anything
but meaningless. All of this was intended as a revenge upon his
father, against whom he harboured a grudge for having misled him
with the stork fable. It was just as though he had meant to say:
‘If you really thought I was as stupid as all that, and
expected me to believe that the stork brought Hanna, then in return
I expect
you
to accept
my
inventions as the
truth.’ This act of revenge on the part of our young enquirer
upon his father was succeeded by the clearly correlated phantasy of
teasing and beating horses. This phantasy, again, had two
constituents. On the one hand, it was based upon the teasing to
which he had submitted his father just before; and, on the other
hand, it reproduced the obscure sadistic desires directed towards
his mother, which had already found expression (though they had not
at first been understood) in his phantasies of doing something
forbidden. Hans even confessed consciously to a desire to beat his
mother.

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   There are not many more mysteries
ahead of us now. An obscure phantasy of missing a train seems to
have been a forerunner of the later notion of handing over
Hans’s father to his grandmother at Lainz, for the phantasy
dealt with a visit to Lainz, and his grandmother appeared in it.
Another phantasy, in which a boy gave the guard 50,000 florins to
let him ride on the truck, almost sounds like a plan of buying his
mother from his father, part of whose power, of course, lay in his
wealth. At about this time, too, he confessed, with a degree of
openness which he had never before reached, that he wished to get
rid of his father, and that the reason he wished it was that his
father interfered with his own intimacy with his mother. We must
not be surprised to find the same wishes constantly reappearing in
the course of an analysis. The monotony only attaches to the
analyst’s interpretations of these wishes. For Hans they were
not mere repetitions, but steps in a progressive development from
timid hinting to fully conscious, undistorted perspicuity.

   What remains are just such
confirmations on Hans’s part of analytical conclusions which
our interpretations had already established. In an entirely
unequivocal symptomatic act, which he disguised slightly from the
maid but not at all from his father, he showed how he imagined a
birth took place; but if we look into it more closely we can see
that he showed something else, that he was hinting at something
which was not alluded to again in the analysis. He pushed a small
penknife which belonged to his mother in through a round hole in
the body of an india-rubber doll, and then let it drop out again by
tearing apart the doll’s legs. The enlightenment which he
received from his parents soon afterwards, to the effect that
children do in fact grow inside their mother’s body and are
pushed out of it like a lumf, came too late; it could tell him
nothing new. Another symptomatic act, happening as though by
accident, involved a confession that he had wished his father dead;
for, just at the moment his father was talking of this death-wish,
Hans let a horse that he was playing with fall down - knocked it
over in fact. Further, he confirmed in so many words the hypothesis
that heavily loaded carts represented his mother’s pregnancy
to him, and the horse’s falling down was like having a baby.
The most delightful piece of confirmation in this connection - a
proof that, in his view, children were ‘lumfs’ - was
his inventing the name of ‘Lodi’ for his favourite
child. There was some delay in reporting this fact, for it then
appeared that he had been playing with this sausage child of his
for a long time past.¹

  
¹
I remember a set of drawings by T. T. Heine
in a copy of
Simplicissimus
, in which that brilliant
illustrator depicted the fate of the pork-butcher’s child,
who fell into the sausage machine, and then, in the shape of a
small sausage, was mourned over by his parents, received the
Church’s blessing, and flew up to Heaven. The artist’s
idea seems a puzzling one at first, but the Lodi episode in this
analysis enables us to trace it back to its infantile
root.

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   We have already considered
Hans’s two concluding phantasies, with which his recovery was
rounded off. One of them, that of the plumber giving him a new and,
as his father guessed, a bigger widdler, was not merely a
repetition of the earlier phantasy concerning the plumber and the
bath. The new one was a triumphant, wishful phantasy, and with it
he overcame his fear of castration. His other phantasy, which
confessed to the wish to be married to his mother and to have many
children by her, did not merely exhaust the content of the
unconscious complexes which had been stirred up by the sight of the
falling horse and which had generated his anxiety. It also
corrected that portion of those thoughts which was entirely
unacceptable; for, instead of killing his father, it made him
innocuous by promoting him to a marriage with Hans’s
grandmother. With this phantasy both the illness and the analysis
came to an appropriate end.

   While the analysis of a case is
in progress it is impossible to obtain any clear impression of the
structure and development of the neurosis. That is the business of
a synthetic process which must be performed subsequently. In
attempting to carry out such a synthesis of little Hans’s
phobia we shall take as our basis the account of his mental
constitution, of his governing sexual wishes, and of his
experiences up to the time of his sister’s birth, which we
have given in an earlier part of this paper.

   The arrival of his sister brought
into Hans’s life many new elements, which from that time on
gave him no rest. In the first place he was obliged to submit to a
certain degree of privation: to begin with, a temporary separation
from his mother, and later a permanent diminution in the amount of
care and attention which he had received from her and which
thenceforward he had to grow accustomed to sharing with his sister.
In the second place, he experienced a revival of the pleasures he
had enjoyed when he was looked after as an infant; for they were
called up by all that he saw his mother doing for the baby. As a
result of these two influences his erotic needs became intensified,
while at the same time they began to obtain insufficient
satisfaction. He made up for the loss which his sister’s
arrival had entailed on him by imagining that he had children of
his own; and so long as he was at Gmunden - on his second visit
there - and could really play with these children, he found a
sufficient outlet for his affections. But after his return to
Vienna he was once more alone, and set all his hopes upon his
mother. He had meanwhile suffered another privation, having been
exiled from his parents’ bedroom at the age of four and a
half. His intensified erotic excitability now found expression in
phantasies, by which in his loneliness he conjured up his playmates
of the past summer, and in regular auto-erotic satisfaction
obtained by a masturbatory stimulation of his genitals.

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   But in the third place his
sister’s birth stimulated him to an effort of thought which,
on the one hand, it was impossible to bring to a conclusion, and
which, on the other hand, involved him in emotional conflicts. He
was faced with the great riddle of where babies come from, which is
perhaps the first problem to engage a child’s mental powers,
and of which the riddle of the Theban Sphinx is probably no more
than a distorted version. He rejected the proffered solution of the
stork having brought Hanna. For he had noticed that months before
the baby’s birth his mother’s body had grown big, that
then she had gone to bed, and had groaned while the birth was
taking place, and that when she got up she was thin again. He
therefore inferred that Hanna had been inside his mother’s
body, and had then come out like a ‘lumf’. He was able
to imagine the act of giving birth as a pleasurable one by relating
it to his own first feelings of pleasure in passing stool; and he
was thus able to find a double motive for wishing to have children
of his own: the pleasure of giving birth to them and the pleasure
(the compensatory pleasure, as it were) of looking after them.
There was nothing in all of this that could have led him into
doubts or conflicts.

   But there was something else,
which could not fail to make him uneasy. His father must have had
something to do with little Hanna’s birth, for he had
declared that Hanna and Hans himself were his children. Yet it was
certainly not his father who had brought them into the world, but
his mother. This father of his came between him and his mother.
When he was there Hans could not sleep with his mother, and when
his mother wanted to take Hans into bed with her, his father used
to call out. Hans had learnt from experience how well-off he could
be in his father’s absence, and it was only justifiable that
he should wish to get rid of him. And then Hans’s hostility
had received a fresh reinforcement. His father had told him the lie
about the stork and so made it impossible for him to ask for
enlightenment upon these things. He not only prevented his being in
bed with his mother, but also kept from him the knowledge he was
thirsting for. He was putting Hans at a disadvantage in both
directions, and was obviously doing so for his own benefit.

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   But this father, whom he could
not help hating as a rival, was the same father whom he had always
loved and was bound to go on loving, who had been his model, had
been his first playmate, and had looked after him from his earliest
infancy: and this it was that gave rise to the first conflict. Nor
could this conflict find an immediate solution. For Hans’s
nature had so developed that for the moment his love could not but
keep the upper hand and suppress his hate - though it could not
kill it, for his hate was perpetually kept alive by his love for
his mother.

   But his father not only knew
where children came from, he actually performed it - the thing that
Hans could only obscurely divine. The widdler must have something
to do with it, for his own grew excited whenever he thought of
these things - and it must be a big widdler too, bigger than
Hans’s own. If he listened to these premonitory sensations he
could only suppose that it was a question of some act of violence
performed upon his mother, of smashing something, of making an
opening into something, of forcing a way into an enclosed space -
such were the impulses that he felt stirring within him. But
although the sensations of his penis had put him on the road to
postulating a vagina, yet he could not solve the problem, for
within his experience no such thing existed as his widdler
required. On the contrary, his conviction that his mother possessed
a penis just as he did stood in the way of any solution. His
attempt at discovering what it was that had to be done with his
mother in order that she might have children sank down into his
unconscious; and his two active impulses - the hostile one towards
his father and the sadistic-tender one towards his mother - could
be put to no use, the first because of the love that existed side
by side with the hatred, and the second because of the perplexity
in which his infantile sexual theories left him.

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   This is how, basing my
conclusions upon the findings of the analysis, I am obliged to
reconstruct the unconscious complexes and wishes, the repression
and reawakening of which produced little Hans’s phobia. I am
aware that in so doing I am attributing a great deal to the mental
capacity of a child between four and five years of age; but I have
let myself be guided by what we have recently learned, and I do not
consider myself bound by the prejudices of our ignorance. It might
perhaps have been possible to make use of Hans’s fear of the
‘making a row with the legs’ for filling up a few more
gaps in our adjudication upon the evidence. Hans, it is true,
declared that it reminded him of his kicking about with his legs
when he was compelled to leave off playing so as to do lumf; so
that this element of the neurosis becomes connected with the
problem whether his mother liked having children or was compelled
to have them. But I have an impression that this is not the whole
explanation of the ‘making a row with the legs’.
Hans’s father was unable to confirm my suspicion that there
was some recollection stirring in the child’s mind of having
observed a scene of sexual intercourse between his parents in their
bedroom. So let us be content with what we have discovered.

   It is hard to say what the
influence was which, in the situation we have just sketched, led to
the sudden change in Hans and to the transformation of his
libidinal longing into anxiety - to say from what direction it was
that repression set in. The question could probably only be decided
by making a comparison between this analysis and a number of
similar ones. Whether the scales were turned by the child’s
intellectual
inability to solve the difficult problem of the
begetting of children and to cope with the aggressive impulses that
were liberated by his approaching its solution, or whether the
effect was produced by a
somatic
incapacity, a
constitutional intolerance of the masturbatory gratification in
which he regularly indulged (whether, that is, the mere persistence
of sexual excitement at such a high pitch of intensity was bound to
bring about a revulsion) - this question must be left open until
fresh experience can come to our assistance.