Contributions to the neue freie presse 1 страница

(1903-4)

I REVIEW OF GEORG BIEDENKAPP’S IM KAMPFE GEGEN HIRNBACILLEN

Concealed behind this somewhat unpromising title is the book of a brave man who succeeds in telling the reader much that is worthy of consideration. The sub-title of the work reveals more of its content: ‘A Philosophy of Small Words’. The author is in fact fighting against those ‘little words and arrangements of words which exclude or include too much’ and which reveal, in people who have the habit of using them for preference, a tendency towards ‘exclusive or superlative judgements’. It is self-evident - our author would contest even this phrase - that the fight is not concerned with these harmless words but with the tendency to become intoxicated by them and to forget, on account of the exaggerated representation thus achieved, the necessary limitations on our pronouncements and the inevitable relativity of our judgements. It really serves as a useful warning if one is shown how much that was described by people of an earlier generation as ‘self-evident’ or as ‘nonsensical’ ranks with us to-day conversely as nonsensical or self-evident; or if we observe, in a series of well-chosen examples, to what a narrowing of their mental horizon even important writers must plead guilty, as a result of their misuse of superlatives. The exhortation to moderation in judgement and expression actually serves our author only as a point of departure for further discussions on other ‘errors of thought’ of human beings - on the central delusion, faith, on atheistic morality, and the like. In all these observations is manifest the author’s honest endeavour to take seriously the implications of the particular view of the world necessitated by the discoveries of modern science, in particular of the theory of evolution. A lot that is psychologically accurate is included, and many truths of the kind that have often been said before but cannot be often enough repeated. The author has set himself the thankless task ‘of improving and converting people’ by means of exerting a sober influence, without seeking to move them to laughter by humour or sweep them along with him by passion. Let us wish him all success.

II REVIEW OF JOHN BIGELOW’S THE MYSTERY OF SLEEP

Solving the mystery of sleep might well have been reserved to science; the pious author, however, operates with biblical arguments and teleological causes. For example: it would be an idea unworthy of divine providence to suppose that it would allow human beings to spend a full third of their life in spiritual inactivity. Sleep is rather that state in which divine influence penetrates most freely and most effectively into human mental life. But in spite of all objections to the author’s way of thinking we will not omit to emphasize the kernel of truth in his assertion. Scientific studies of the state of mental life during sleep, too, oblige us to relinquish as inadequate our previous assumption that sleep reduces the play of mental activity to a minimum. The important processes of unconscious mental and even intellectual activity continue - as the elucidation of dreams given by your reviewer demonstrates - even during profound sleep. This unconscious mental activity deserves to be called ‘daemonic’ but scarcely divine.

III OBITUARY OF PROFESSOR S. HAMMERSCHLAG

S. Hammerschlag, who relinquished his activity as a Jewish religious teacher about thirty years ago, was one of those personalities who possess the gift of leaving ineradicable impressions on the development of their pupils. A spark from the same fire which animated the spirit of the great Jewish seers and prophets burned in him and was not extinguished until old age weakened his powers. But the passionate side of his nature was happily tempered by the ideal of humanism of our German classical period which governed him, and his method of education was based on the foundation of the philological and classical studies to which he had devoted his own youth. Religious instruction served him as a way of educating towards love of the humanities, and from the material of Jewish history he was able to find means of tapping the sources of enthusiasm hidden in the hearts of young people and of making it flow out far beyond the limitations of nationalism or dogma. Those of his pupils who were later allowed to seek him out in his own home gained a paternally solicitous friend in him and were able to perceive that sympathetic kindness was the fundamental characteristic of his nature. Feelings of gratitude towards a revered teacher - undiminished through the course of decades - received most dignified expression over his grave from Dr. Friedjung the historian.

ANALYSIS OF A PHOBIA IN A FIVE-YEAR-OLD BOY (1909)

In the following pages I propose to describe the course of the illness and recovery of a very youthful patient. The case history is not, strictly speaking, derived from my own observation. It is true that I laid down the general lines of the treatment, and that on one single occasion, when I had a conversation with the boy, I took a direct share in it; but the treatment itself was carried out by the child’s father, and it is to him that I owe my sincerest thanks for allowing me to publish his notes upon the case. But his services go further than this. No one else, in my opinion, could possibly have prevailed on the child to make any such avowals; the special knowledge by means of which he was able to interpret the remarks made by his five-year-old son was indispensable, and without it the technical difficulties in the way of conducting a psycho-analysis upon so young a child would have been insuperable. It was only because the authority of a father and of a physician were united in a single person, and because in him both affectionate care and scientific interest were combined, that it was possible in this one instance to apply the method to a use to which it would not otherwise have lent itself.

But the peculiar value of this observation lies in the considerations which follow. When a physician treats an adult neurotic by psycho-analysis, the process he goes through of uncovering the psychical formations, layer by layer, eventually enables him to frame certain hypotheses as to the patient’s infantile sexuality; and it is in the components of the latter that he believes he has discovered the motive forces of all the neurotic symptoms of later life. I have set out these hypotheses in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), and I am aware that they seem as strange to an outside reader as they seem incontrovertible to a psycho-analyst. But even a psycho-analyst may confess to the wish for a more direct and less roundabout proof of these fundamental theorems. Surely there must be a possibility of observing in children at first hand and in all the freshness of life the sexual impulses and wishes which we dig out so laboriously in adults from among their own débris - especially as it is also our belief that they are the common property of all men, a part of the human constitution, and merely exaggerated or distorted in the case of neurotics.

With this end in view I have for many years been urging my pupils and my friends to collect observations of the sexual life of children - the existence of which has as a rule been cleverly overlooked or deliberately denied. Among the material which came into my possession as a result of these requests, the reports which I received at regular intervals about little Hans soon began to take a prominent place. His parents were both among my closest adherents, and they had agreed that in bringing up their first child they would use no more coercion than might be absolutely necessary for maintaining good behaviour. And, as the child developed into a cheerful, good-natured and lively little boy, the experiment of letting him grow up and express himself without being intimidated went on satisfactorily. I shall now proceed to reproduce his father’s records of little Hans just as I received them; and I shall of course refrain from any attempt at spoiling the naïveté and directness of the nursery by making any conventional emendations.

3 The first reports of Hans date from a period when he was not quite three years old. At that time, by means of various remarks and questions, he was showing a quite peculiarly lively interest in that portion of his body which he used to describe as his ‘widdler’.¹ Thus he once asked his mother this question:

Hans: ‘Mummy, have you got a widdler too?’

Mother: ‘Of course. Why?’

Hans: ‘I was only just thinking.’

At the same age he went into a cow-shed once and saw a cow being milked. ‘Oh, look!’ he said, ‘there’s milk coming out of its widdler!’

Even these first observations begin to rouse an expectation that much, if not most, of what little Hans shows us will turn out to be typical of the sexual development of children in general. I once put forward the view² that there was no need to be too much horrified at finding in a woman the idea of sucking at a male organ. This repellent impulse, I argued, had a most innocent origin, since it was derived from sucking at the mother’s breast; and in this connection, I went on, a cows udder plays an apt part as an intermediate image, being in its nature a mamma and in its shape and position a penis. Little Hans’s discovery confirms the latter part of my contention.

Meanwhile his interest in widdlers was by no means a purely theoretical one; as might have been expected, it also impelled him to touch his member. When he was three and a half his mother found him with his hand on his penis. She threatened him in these words: ‘If you do that, I shall send for Dr. A. to cut off your widdler. And then what’ll you widdle with?’

Hans: ‘With my bottom.’

¹ [‘Wiwimacher’ in the original.]

² See my ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905e).

He made this reply without having any sense of guilt as yet. But this was the occasion of his acquiring the ‘castration complex’, the presence of which we are so often obliged to infer in analysing neurotics, though they one and all struggle violently against recognizing it. There is much of importance to be said upon the significance of this element in the life of a child. The ‘castration complex’ has left marked traces behind it in myths (and not only in Greek myths); in a passage in my Interpretation of Dreams, and elsewhere, I have touched upon the part it plays.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1923:] - Since this was written, the study of the castration complex has been further developed in contributions to the subject by Lou Andreas-Salomé, A. Stärcke, F. Alexander, and others. It has been urged that every time his mother’s breast is withdrawn from a baby he is bound to feel it as castration (that is to say, as the loss of what he regards as an important part of his own body); that, further, he cannot fail to be similarly affected by the regular loss of his faeces; and, finally, that the act of birth itself (consisting as it does in the separation of the child from his mother, with whom he has hitherto been united) is the prototype of all castration. While recognizing all of these roots of the complex, I have nevertheless put forward the view that the term ‘castration complex’ ought to be confined to those excitations and consequences which are bound up with the loss of the penis. Any one who, in analysing adults, has become convinced of the invariable presence of the castration complex, will of course find difficulty in ascribing its origin to a chance threat - of a kind which is not, after all, of such universal occurrence; he will be driven to assume that children construct this danger for themselves out of the slightest hints, which will never be wanting. This circumstance is also the motive, indeed, that has stimulated the search for those deeper roots of the complex which are universally forthcoming. But this makes it all the more valuable that in the case of little Hans the threat of castration is reported by his parents themselves, and moreover at a date before there was any question of his phobia.

At about the same age (three and a half), standing in front of the lions’ cage at Schönbrunn, little Hans called out in a joyful and excited voice: ‘I saw the lion’s widdler.’

Animals owe a good deal of their importance in myths and fairy tales to the openness with which they display their genitals and their sexual functions to the inquisitive little human child. There can be no doubt about Hans’s sexual curiosity; but it also roused the spirit of enquiry in him and enabled him to arrive at genuine abstract knowledge.

When he was at the station once (at three and three quarters) he saw some water being let out of an engine. ‘Oh, look,’ he said, ‘the engine’s widdling. Where’s it got its widdler?’

After a little he added in reflective tones: ‘A dog and a horse have widdlers; a table and a chair haven’t.’ He had thus got hold of an essential characteristic for differentiating between animate and inanimate objects.

Thirst for knowledge seems to be inseparable from sexual curiosity. Hans’s curiosity was particularly directed towards his parents.

Hans (aged three and three-quarters): ‘Daddy, have you got a widdler too?’

Father: ‘Yes, of course.’

Hans: ‘But I’ve never seen it when you were undressing.’

Another time he was looking on intently while his mother undressed before going to bed. ‘What are you staring like that for?’ she asked.

Hans: ‘I was only looking to see if you’d got a widdler too.’

Mother: ‘Of course. Didn’t you know that?’

Hans: ‘No. I thought you were so big you’d have a widdler like a horse.’

This expectation of little Hans’s deserves to be borne in mind; it will become important later on.6 But the great event of Hans’s life was the birth of his little sister Hanna when he was exactly three and a half.¹ His behaviour on that occasion was noted down by his father on the spot: ‘At five in the morning’, he writes, ‘labour began, and Hans’s bed was moved into the next room. He woke up there at seven, and, hearing his mother groaning, asked: "Why’s Mummy coughing?" Then, after a pause, "The stork’s coming to-day for certain."

‘Naturally he has often been told during the last few days that the stork is going to bring a little girl or a little boy; and he quite rightly connected the unusual sounds of groaning with the stork’s arrival.

‘Later on he was taken into the kitchen. He saw the doctor’s bag in the front hall and asked: "What’s that?" "A bag," was the reply. Upon which he declared with conviction: "The stork’s coming to-day." After the baby’s delivery the midwife came into the kitchen and Hans heard her ordering some tea to be made. At this he said: "I know! Mummy’s to have some tea because she’s coughing." He was then called into the bedroom. He did not look at his mother, however, but at the basins and other vessels, filled with blood and water, that were still standing about the room. Pointing to the blood-stained bed-pan, he observed in a surprised voice: "But blood doesn’t come out of my widdler."

‘Everything he says shows that he connects what is strange in the situation with the arrival of the stork. He meets everything he sees with a very suspicious and intent look, and there can be no question that his first doubts about the stork have taken root.

‘Hans is very jealous of the new arrival, and whenever any one praises her, says she is a lovely baby, and so on, he at once declares scornfully: "But she’s not got any teeth yet."² And in fact when he saw her for the first time he was very much surprised that she was unable to speak, and decided that this was because she had no teeth. During the first few days he was naturally put very much in the background. He was suddenly taken ill with a sore throat. In his fever he was heard saying: "But I don’t want a baby sister!"

¹ April 1903 to October 1906.

² This again is a typical mode of behaviour. Another little boy, only two years his sister’s senior, used to parry similar remarks with an angry cry of ‘Too 'ickle! too 'ickle!’7

‘Some six months later he had got over his jealousy, and his brotherly affection for the baby was only equalled by his sense of his own superiority over her.¹

‘A little later Hans was watching his seven-day-old sister being given a bath. "But her widdler’s still quite small," he remarked; and then added, as though by way of consolation: "When she grows up it’ll get bigger all right."²

¹ Another child, rather older than Hans, welcomed his younger brother with the words: ‘The stork can take him away again.’ Compare in this connection my remarks in The Interpretation of Dreams on dreams of the death of loved relatives.

² Two other boys were reported to me as having made the same judgement, expressed in identical words and followed by the same anticipation, when they were allowed to satisfy their curiosity and look at their baby sister’s body for the first time. One might well feel horrified at such signs of the premature decay of a child’s intellect. Why was it that these young enquirers did not report what they really saw - namely, that there was no widdler there? In little Hans’s case, at all events, we can account completely for the faulty perception. We are aware that by a process of careful induction he had arrived at the general proposition that every animate object, in contradistinction to inanimate ones, possesses a widdler. His mother had confirmed him in this conviction by giving him corroborative information in regard to persons inaccessible to his own observation. He was now utterly incapable of surrendering what he had achieved merely on the strength of this single observation made upon his little sister. He therefore made a judgement that in that instance also there was a widdler present, only that it was still very small, but that it would grow till it was as big as a horse’s.

We can go a step further in vindicating little Hans’s honour. As a matter of fact, he was behaving no worse than a philosopher of the school of Wundt. In the view of that school, consciousness is the invariable characteristic of what is mental, just as in the view of little Hans a widdler is the indispensable criterion of what is animate. If now the philosopher comes across mental processes whose existence cannot but be inferred, but about which there is not a trace of consciousness to be detected - for the subject, in fact, knows nothing of them, although it is impossible to avoid inferring their existence - then, instead of saying that they are unconscious mental processes, he calls them semi-conscious. The widdler’s still very small! And in this comparison the advantage is in favour of little Hans. For, as is so often the case with the sexual researches of children, behind the mistake a piece of genuine knowledge lies concealed. Little girls do possess a small widdler, which we call a clitoris, though it does not grow any larger but remains permanently stunted. Compare my short paper on ‘The Sexual Theories of Children’ (1908c).

8 ‘At the same age (when he was three and three-quarters) Hans produced his first account of a dream: "To-day when I was asleep I thought I was at Gmunden with Mariedl."

‘Mariedl was the thirteen-year-old daughter of our landlord and used often to play with him.’

As Hans’s father was telling his mother the dream in his presence, he corrected him, saying: ‘Not with Mariedl, but quite alone with Mariedl.’

In this connection we learn: ‘In the summer of 1906 Hans was at Gmunden, and used to run about all day long with our landlord’s children. When we left Gmunden we thought he would be very much upset by having to come away and move back to town. To our surprise this was not so. He seemed glad of the change, and for several weeks he talked very little about Gmunden. It was not until after some weeks had passed that there began to emerge reminiscences - often vividly coloured - of the time he had spent at Gmunden. During the last four weeks or so he has been working these reminiscences up into phantasies. He imagines that he is playing with the other children, with Berta, Olga, and Fritzl; he talks to them as though they were really with him, and he is capable of amusing himself in this way for hours at a time. Now that he has got a sister and is obviously taken up with the problem of the origin of children, he always calls Berta and Olga "his children"; and once he added: "my children Berta and Olga were brought by the stork too." The dream, occurring now, after six months’ absence from Gmunden, is evidently to be read as an expression of a longing to go back there.’

Thus far his father. I will anticipate what is to come by adding that when Hans made this last remark about his children having been brought by the stork, he was contradicting aloud a doubt that was lurking within him.9 His father luckily made a note of many things which turned out later on to be of unexpected value. ‘I drew a giraffe for Hans, who has been to Schönbrunn several times lately. He said to me: "Draw its widdler too." "Draw it yourself," I answered; whereupon he added this line to my picture (see Fig. 1). He began by drawing a short stroke, and then added a bit on to it, remarking: "Its widdler’s longer."

Fig 1.

‘Hans and I walked past a horse that was micturating, and he said: "The horse has got its widdler underneath like me."

‘He was watching his three-months-old sister being given a bath, and said in pitying tones: "She has got a tiny little widdler."

‘He was given a doll to play with and undressed it. He examined it carefully and said: "Her widdler’s ever so tiny."'

As we already know, this formula made it possible for him to go on believing in his discovery (see p. 2005).

Every investigator runs the risk of falling into an occasional error. It is some consolation for him if, like little Hans in the next example, he does not err alone but can quote a common linguistic usage in his support. For Hans saw a monkey in his picture-book one day, and pointing to its up-curled tail, said: ‘Daddy, look at its widdler!’

His interest in widdlers led him to invent a special game of his own. ‘Leading out of the front hall there is a lavatory and also a dark storeroom for keeping wood in. For some time past Hans has been going into this wood-cupboard and saying: "I’m going to my W.C." I once looked in to see what he was doing in the dark storeroom. He showed me his parts and said: "I’m widdling." That is to say, he has been "playing" at W.C. That it is in the nature of a game is shown not merely by the fact that he was only pretending to widdle, but also by the fact that he does not go into the W.C., which would after all be far simpler, but prefers the wood-cupboard and calls it "his W.C."'

0 We should be doing Hans an injustice if we were to trace only the auto-erotic features of his sexual life. His father has detailed information to give us on the subject of his love relationships with other children. From these we can discern the existence of an ‘object-choice’ just as in the case of an adult; and also, it must be confessed, a very striking degree of inconstancy and a disposition to polygamy.

‘In the winter (at the age of three and three-quarters) I took Hans to the skating rink and introduced him to my friend N.’s two little daughters, who were about ten years old. Hans sat down beside them, while they, in the consciousness of their mature age, looked down on the little urchin with a good deal of contempt; he gazed at them with admiration, though this proceeding made no great impression on them. In spite of this Hans always spoke of them afterwards as "my little girls". "Where are my little girls? When are my little girls coming?" And for some weeks he kept tormenting me with the question: "When am I going to the rink again to see my little girls?"

A five-year-old boy cousin came to visit Hans, who had by then reached the age of four. Hans was constantly putting his arms round him, and once, as he was giving him one of these tender embraces, said: ‘I am so fond of you.’

This is the first trace of homosexuality that we have come across in him, but it will not be the last. Little Hans seems to be a positive paragon of all the vices.1 ‘When Hans was four years old we moved into a new flat. A door led out of the kitchen on to a balcony, from which one could see into a flat on the opposite side of the courtyard. In this flat Hans discovered a little girl of about seven or eight. He would sit on the step leading on to the balcony so as to admire her, and would stop there for hours on end. At four o’clock in the afternoon in particular, when the little girl came home from school, he was not to be kept in the room, and nothing could induce him to abandon his post of observation. Once, when the little girl failed to make her appearance at the window at her usual hour, Hans grew quite restless, and kept pestering the servants with questions. "When’s the little girl coming? Where’s the little girl?" and so on. When she did appear at last, he was quite blissful and never took his eyes off the flat opposite. The violence with which this "long-range love"¹ came over him is to be explained by his having no playmates of either sex. Spending a good deal of time with other children clearly forms part of a child’s normal development.

‘Hans obtained some companionship of this kind when, shortly afterwards (he was by then four and a half), we moved to Gmunden for the summer holidays. In our house there his playmates were our landlord’s children: Franzl (about twelve years old), Fritzl (eight), Olga (seven), and Berta (five). Besides these there were the neighbour’s children, Anna (ten), and two other little girls of nine and seven whose names I have forgotten. Hans’s favourite was Fritzl; he often hugged him and made protestations of his love. Once when he was asked: ‘"Which of the girls are you fondest of?" he answered: "Fritzl!" At the same time he treated the girls in a most aggressive, masculine and arrogant way, embracing them and kissing them heartily - a process to which Berta in particular offered no objection. When Berta was coming out of the room one evening he put his arms round her neck and said in the fondest tones: "Berta, you are a dear!" This, by the way, did not prevent his kissing the others as well and assuring them of his love. He was fond, too, of the fourteen-year-old Mariedl - another of our landlord’s daughters - who used to play with him. One evening as he was being put to bed he said: "I want Mariedl to sleep with me." On being told that would not do, he said: "Then she shall sleep with Mummy or with Daddy." He was told that would not do either, but that Mariedl must sleep with her own father and mother. Upon which the following dialogue took place:

‘Hans: "Oh, then I’II just go downstairs and sleep with Mariedl."

‘Mother: "You really want to go away from Mummy and sleep downstairs?"

‘Hans: "Oh, I’II come up again in the morning to have breakfast and do number one."

‘Mother: "Well, if you really want to go away from Daddy and Mummy, then take your coat and knickers - and good-bye!"

‘Hans did in fact take his clothes and go towards the staircase, to go and sleep with Mariedl, but, it need hardly be said, he was fetched back.

‘(Behind his wish, "I want Mariedl to sleep with us," there of course lay another one: "I want Mariedl" (with whom he liked to be so much) "to become one of our family." But Hans’s father and mother were in the habit of taking him into their bed, though only occasionally, and there can be no doubt that lying beside them had aroused erotic feelings in him; so that his wish to sleep with Mariedl had an erotic sense as well. Lying in bed with his father or mother was a source of erotic feelings in Hans just as it is in every other child.’

In spite of his accesses of homosexuality, little Hans bore himself like a true man in the face of his mother’s challenge.

¹ Und die Liebe per Distanz,

Kurzgesagt, missfällt mir ganz.

WILHELM BUSCH

[Long-range love, I must admit, Does not suit my taste a bit.]2 ‘In the next instance, too, Hans said to his mother: "I say, I should so like to sleep with the little girl." This episode has given us a great deal of entertainment, for Hans has really behaved like a grown-up person in love. For the past few days a pretty little girl of about eight has been coming to the restaurant where we have lunch. Of course Hans fell in love with her on the spot. He keeps constantly turning round in his chair to take furtive looks at her; when he has finished eating, he stations himself in her vicinity so as to flirt with her, but if he finds he is being observed, he blushes scarlet. If his glances are returned by the little girl, he at once looks shamefacedly the other way. His behaviour is naturally a great joy to every one lunching at the restaurant. Every day as he is taken there he says: "Do you think the little girl will be there to-day?" And when at last she appears, he goes quite red, just as a grown-up person would in such a case. One day he came to me with a beaming face and whispered in my ear: "Daddy, I know where the little girl lives. I saw her going up the steps in such-and-such a place." Whereas he treats the little girls at home aggressively, in this other affair he appears in the part of a platonic and languishing admirer. Perhaps this has to do with the little girls at home being village children, while the other is a young lady of refinement. As I have already mentioned, he once said he would like to sleep with her.

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