Freud - Complete Works (364 page)

   Chronological considerations make
it impossible for us to attach any great importance to the actual
precipitating cause of the outbreak of Hans’s illness, for he
had shown signs of apprehensiveness long before he saw the
bus-horse fall down in the street.

   Nevertheless, the neurosis took
its start directly from this chance event and preserved a trace of
it in the circumstance of the horse being exalted into the object
of his anxiety. In itself the impression of the accident which he
happened to witness carried no ‘traumatic force’; it
acquired its great effectiveness only from the fact that horses had
formerly been of importance to him as objects of his predilection
and interest, from the fact that he associated the event in his
mind with an earlier event at Gmunden which had more claim to be
regarded as traumatic, namely, with Fritzl’s falling down
while he was playing at horses, and lastly from the fact that there
was an easy path of association from Fritzl to his father. Indeed,
even these connections would probably not have been sufficient if
it had not been that, thanks to the pliability and ambiguity of
associative chains, the same event showed itself capable of
stirring the second of the complexes that lurked in Hans’s
unconscious, the complex of his pregnant mother’s
confinement. From that moment the way was clear for the return of
the repressed; and it returned in such a manner that
the
pathogenic material was remodelled and transposed on to the
horse-complex, while the accompanying affects were uniformly
transformed into anxiety
.

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

2116

   It deserves to be noticed that
the ideational content of Hans’s phobia as it then stood had
to be submitted to one further process of distortion and
substitution before his consciousness took cognizance of it.
Hans’s first formulation of his anxiety was: ‘the horse
will bite me’; and this was derived from another episode at
Gmunden, which was on the one hand related to his hostile wishes
towards his father and on the other hand was reminiscent of the
warning he had been given against masturbation. Some interfering
influence, emanating from his parents perhaps, had made itself
felt. I am not certain whether the reports upon Hans were at that
time drawn up with sufficient care to enable us to decide whether
he expressed his anxiety in this form
before
or not until
after
his mother had taken him to task on the subject of
masturbating. I should be inclined to suspect that it was not until
afterwards, though this would contradict the account given in the
case history. At any rate, it is evident that at every point
Hans’s hostile complex against his father screened his
lustful one about his mother, just as it was the first to be
disclosed and dealt with in the analysis.

   In other cases of this kind there
would be a great deal more to be said upon the structure, the
development, and the diffusion of the neurosis. But the history of
little Hans’s attack was very short; almost as soon as it had
begun, its place was taken by the history of its treatment. And
although during the treatment the phobia appeared to develop
further and to extend over new objects and to lay down new
conditions, his father, since he was himself treating the case,
naturally had sufficient penetration to see that it was merely a
question of the emergence of material that was already in
existence, and not of fresh productions for which the treatment
might be held responsible. In the treatment of other cases it would
not always be possible to count upon so much penetration.

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

2117

   Before I can regard this
synthesis as completed I must turn to yet another aspect of the
case, which will take us into the very heart of the difficulties
that lie in the way of our understanding of neurotic states. We
have seen how our little patient was overtaken by a great wave of
repression and that it caught precisely those of his sexual
components that were dominant.¹ He gave up masturbation, and
turned away in disgust from everything that reminded him of
excrement and of looking on at other people performing their
natural functions. But these were not the components which were
stirred up by the precipitating cause of the illness (his seeing
the horse fall down) or which provided the material for the
symptoms, that is, the content of the phobia.

   This allows us, therefore, to
make a radical distinction. We shall probably come to understand
the case more deeply if we turn to those other components which
do
fulfil the two conditions that have just been mentioned.
These other components were tendencies in Hans which had already
been suppressed and which, so far as we can tell, had never been
able to find uninhibited expression: hostile and jealous feelings
towards his father, and sadistic impulses (premonitions, as it
were, of copulation) towards his mother. These early suppressions
may perhaps have gone to form the predisposition for his subsequent
illness. These aggressive propensities of Hans’s found no
outlet, and as soon as there came a time of privation and of
intensified sexual excitement, they tried to break their way out
with reinforced strength. It was then that the battle which we call
his ‘phobia’ burst out. During the course of it a part
of the repressed ideas, in a distorted form and transposed on to
another complex, forced their way into consciousness as the content
of the phobia. But it was a decidedly paltry success. Victory lay
with the forces of repression; and
they made use of the
opportunity to extend their domain over components other than those
that had rebelled
. This last circumstance, however, does not in
the least alter the fact that the essence of Hans’s illness
was entirely dependent upon the nature of the instinctual
components that had to be repulsed. The content of his phobia was
such as to impose a very great measure of restriction upon his
freedom of movement, and that was its purpose. It was therefore a
powerful reaction against the obscure impulses to movement which
were especially directed against his mother. For Hans horses had
always typified pleasure in movement (‘I’m a young
horse’, he had said as he jumped about); but since this
pleasure in movement included the impulse to copulate, the neurosis
imposed a restriction on it and exalted the horse into an emblem of
terror. Thus it would seem as though all that the repressed
instincts got from the neurosis was the honour of providing
pretexts for the appearance of the anxiety in consciousness. But
however clear may have been the victory in Hans’s phobia of
the forces that were opposed to sexuality, nevertheless, since such
an illness is in its very nature a compromise, this cannot have
been all that the repressed instincts obtained. After all,
Hans’s phobia of horses was an obstacle to his going into the
street, and could serve as a means of allowing him to stay at home
with his beloved mother. In this way, therefore, his affection for
his mother triumphantly achieved its aim. In consequence of his
phobia, the lover clung to the object of his love - though, to be
sure, steps had been taken to make him innocuous. The true
character of a neurotic disorder is exhibited in this twofold
result.

 
¹
Hans’s father even
observed that simultaneously with this repression a certain amount
of sublimation set in. From the time of the beginning of his
anxiety Hans began to show an increased interest in music and to
develop his inherited musical gift.

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

2118

   Alfred Adler, in a suggestive
paper,¹ has recently developed the view that anxiety arises
from the suppression of what he calls the ‘aggressive
instinct’, and by a very sweeping synthetic process he
ascribes to that instinct the chief part in human events, ‘in
real life and in the neuroses’. As we have come to the
conclusion that in our present case of phobia the anxiety is to be
explained as being due to the repression of Hans’s aggressive
propensities (the hostile ones against his father and the sadistic
ones against his mother), we seem to have produced a most striking
piece of confirmation of Adler’s view. I am nevertheless
unable to assent to it, and indeed I regard it as a misleading
generalization. I cannot bring myself to assume the existence of a
special aggressive instinct alongside of the familiar instincts of
self-preservation and of sex, and on an equal footing with
them.² It appears to me that Adler has mistakenly promoted
into a special and self-subsisting instinct what is in reality a
universal and indispensable attribute of
all
instincts -
their instinctual [
triebhaft
] and ‘pressing’
character, what might be described as their capacity for initiating
movement. Nothing would then remain of the other instincts but
their relation to an aim, for their relation to the means of
reaching that aim would have been taken over from them by the
‘aggressive instinct’. In spite of all the uncertainty
and obscurity of our theory of instincts I should prefer for the
present to adhere to the usual view, which leaves each instinct its
own power of becoming aggressive; and I should be inclined to
recognize the two instincts which became repressed in Hans as
familiar components of the sexual libido.

  
¹
‘Der Aggressionsbetrieb im Leben und
in der Neurose’ (1908). This is the same paper from which I
have borrowed the term ‘confluence of instincts’. (See
above,
p. 2091
)

  
²
[
Footnote added
1923:] The above
passage was written at a time when Adler seemed still to be taking
his stand upon the ground of psycho-analysis, and before he had put
forward the masculine protest and disavowed repression. Since then
I have myself been obliged to assert the existence of an 
‘aggressive instinct’, but it is different from
Adler’s. I prefer to call it the ‘destructive’ or
‘death instinct’. See
Beyond the Pleasure
Principle
(1920
g
) and
The Ego and the Id
(1923
b
). Its opposition to the libidinal instincts finds an
expression in the familiar polarity of love and hate. My
disagreement with Adler’s view, which results in a universal
characteristic of instincts in general being reduced to be the
property of a single one of them, remains unaltered.

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

2119

(III)

   I shall now proceed to what I
hope will be a brief discussion of how far little Hans’s
phobia offers any contribution of general importance to our views
upon the life and upbringing of children. But before doing so I
must return to the objection which has so long been held over, and
according to which Hans was a neurotic, a ‘degenerate’
with a bad heredity, and not a normal child, knowledge about whom
could be applied to other children. I have for some time been
thinking with pain of the way in which the adherents of ‘the
normal person’ will fall upon poor little Hans as soon as
they are told that he can in fact be shown to have had a hereditary
taint. His beautiful mother fell ill with a neurosis as a result of
a conflict during her girlhood. I was able to be of assistance to
her at the time, and this had in fact been the beginning of my
connection with Hans’s parents. It is only with the greatest
diffidence that I venture to bring forward one or two
considerations in his favour.

   In the first place Hans was not
what one would understand, strictly speaking, by a degenerate
child, condemned by his heredity to be a neurotic. On the contrary,
he was well formed physically, and was a cheerful, amiable,
active-minded young fellow who might give pleasure to more people
than his own father. There can be no question, of course, as to his
sexual precocity; but on that point there is very little material
upon which a fair comparison can be based. I gather, for instance,
from a piece of collective research conducted in America, that it
is by no means such a rare thing to find object-choice and feelings
of love in boys at a similarly early age; and the same may be
learnt from studying the records of the childhood of men who have
later come to be recognized as ‘great’. I should
therefore be inclined to believe that sexual precocity is a
correlate, which is seldom absent, of intellectual precocity, and
that it is therefore to be met with in gifted children more often
than might be expected.

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

2120

   Furthermore, let me say in
Hans’s favour (and I frankly admit my partisan attitude) that
he is not the only child who has been overtaken by a phobia at some
time or other in his childhood. Troubles of that kind are well
known to be quite extraordinarily frequent, even in children the
strictness of whose upbringing has left nothing to be desired. In
later life these children either become neurotic or remain healthy.
Their phobias are shouted down in the nursery because they are
inaccessible to treatment and are decidedly inconvenient. In the
course of months or years they diminish, and the child seems to
recover; but no one can tell what psychological changes are
necessitated by such a recovery, or what alterations in character
are involved in it. When, however, an adult neurotic patient comes
to us for psycho-analytic treatment (and let us assume that his
illness has only become manifest after he has reached maturity), we
find regularly that his neurosis has as its point of departure an
infantile anxiety such as we have been discussing, and is in fact a
continuation of it; so that, as it were, a continuous and
undisturbed thread of psychical activity, taking its start from the
conflicts of his childhood, has been spun through his life -
irrespective of whether the first symptom of those conflicts has
persisted or has retreated under the pressure of circumstances. I
think, therefore, that Hans’s illness may perhaps have been
no more serious than that of many other children who are not
branded as ‘degenerates’; but since he was brought up
without being intimidated, and with as much consideration and as
little coercion as possible, his anxiety dared to show itself more
boldly. With him there was no place for such motives as a bad
conscience or a fear of punishment, which with other children must
no doubt contribute to making the anxiety less. It seems to me that
we concentrate too much upon symptoms and concern ourselves too
little with their causes. In bringing up children we aim only at
being left in peace and having no difficulties, in short, at
training up a model child, and we pay very little attention to
whether such a course of development is for the child’s good
as well. I can therefore quite imagine that it may have been to
Hans’s advantage to have produced this phobia. For it
directed his parents’ attention to the unavoidable
difficulties by which a child is confronted when in the course of
his cultural training he is called upon to overcome the innate
instinctual components of his mind; and his trouble brought his
father to his assistance. It may be that Hans now enjoys an
advantage over other children, in that he no longer carries within
him that seed in the shape of repressed complexes which must always
be of some significance for a child’s later life, and which
undoubtedly brings with it a certain degree of deformity of
character if not a predisposition to a subsequent neurosis. I am
inclined to think that this is so, but I do not know if many others
will share my opinion; nor do I know whether experience will prove
me right.