Contributions to the neue freie presse 7 страница

‘Hans: "I know. I was their Mummy before, now I’m their Daddy."

‘I: "And who’s the children’s Mummy?"

‘Hans: "Why, Mummy, and you’re their Grandaddy."

‘I: "So then you’d like to be as big as me, and be married to Mummy, and then you’d like her to have children."

‘Hans: "Yes, that’s what I’d like, and then my Lainz Grandmummy" (my mother) "will be their Grannie."'

Things were moving towards a satisfactory conclusion. The little Oedipus had found a happier solution than that prescribed by destiny. Instead of putting his father out of the way, he had granted him the same happiness that he desired himself: he made him a grandfather and married him to his own mother too.

¹ Do we not use the word ‘niederkommen’ [literally, ‘to come down’] when a woman is delivered?

3 ‘On May 1st Hans came to me at lunch-time and said: "D’you know what? Let’s write something down for the Professor."

‘I: "Well, and what shall it be?"

‘Hans: "This morning I was in the W.C. with all my children. First I did lumf and widdled, and they looked on. Then I put them on the seat and they widdled and did lumf, and I wiped their behinds with paper. D’you know why? Because I’d so much like to have children; then I’d do everything for them - take them to the W.C., clean their behinds, and do everything one does with children."'

After the admission afforded by this phantasy, it will scarcely be possible to dispute the fact that in Hans’s mind there was pleasure attached to the excretory functions.

‘In the afternoon he ventured into the Stadtpark for the first time. As it is the First of May, no doubt there was less traffic than usual, but still quite enough to have frightened him up to now. He was very proud of his achievement, and after tea I was obliged to go with him to the Stadtpark once again. On the way we met a bus; Hans pointed it out to me, saying: "Look! a stork-box cart!" If he goes with me to the Stadtpark again to-morrow, as we have planned, we shall really be able to regard his illness as cured.

4 ‘On May 2nd Hans came to me in the morning. "I say," he said, "I thought something to-day." At first he had forgotten it; but later on he related what follows, though with signs of considerable resistance: "The plumber came; and first he took away my behind with a pair of pincers, and then gave me another, and then the same with my widdler. He said: ‘Let me see your behind!’ and I had to turn round, and he took it away; and then he said: ‘Let me see your widdler!’"'

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.)

5 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’.]6 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.

IIIDISCUSSION

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 (1905d). 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.

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.

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.

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.

1 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.

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.

At this juncture it is as well to emphasize at once the fact that during his phobia there was an unmistakable repression of these two well-developed components of his sexual activity. He was ashamed of micturating before other people, accused himself of putting his finger to his widdler, made efforts to give up masturbating, and showed disgust at ‘lumf’ and ‘widdle’ and everything that reminded him of them. In his phantasy of looking after his children he undid this latter repression.

A sexual constitution like that of little Hans does not appear to carry with it a predisposition to the development either of perversions or of their negative (we will limit ourselves to a consideration of hysteria). As far as my experience goes (and there is still a real need for speaking with caution on this point) the innate constitution of hysterics - that this is also true of perverts is almost self-evident - is marked by the genital zone being relatively less prominent than the other erotogenic zones. But we must expressly except from this rule one particular ‘aberration’ of sexual life. In those who later become homosexuals we meet with the same predominance in infancy of the genital zone (and especially of the penis) as in normal persons.¹ Indeed it is the high esteem felt by the homosexual for the male organ which decides his fate. In his childhood he chooses women as his sexual object, so long as he assumes that they too possess what in his eyes is an indispensable part of the body; when he becomes convinced that women have deceived him in this particular, they cease to be acceptable to him as a sexual object. He cannot forgo a penis in any one who is to attract him to sexual intercourse; and if circumstances are favourable he will fix his libido upon the ‘woman with a penis’, a youth of feminine appearance. Homosexuals, then, are persons who, owing to the erotogenic importance of their own genitals, cannot do without a similar feature in their sexual object. In the course of their development from auto-erotism to object-love, they have remained at a point of fixation between the two.

¹ As my expectations led me to suppose, and as Sadger’s observations have shown, all such people pass through an amphigenic phase in childhood.4

There is absolutely no justification for distinguishing a special homosexual instinct. What constitutes a homosexual is a peculiarity not in his instinctual life but in his choice of an object. Let me recall what I have said in my Three Essays to the effect that we have mistakenly imagined the bond between instinct and object in sexual life as being more intimate than it really is. A homosexual may have normal instincts, but he is unable to disengage them from a class of objects defined by a particular determinant. And in his childhood, since at that period this determinant is taken for granted as being of universal application, he is able to behave like little Hans, who showed his affection to little boys and girls indiscriminately, and once described his friend Fritzl as ‘the girl he was fondest of’. Hans was a homosexual (as all children may very well be), quite consistently with the fact, which must always be kept in mind, that he was acquainted with only one kind of genital organ - a genital organ like his own.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1923:] I have subsequently (1923e) drawn attention to the fact that the period of sexual development which our little patient was passing through is universally characterized by acquaintance with only one sort of genital organ, namely, the male one. In contrast to the later period of maturity, this period is marked not by a genital primacy but by a primacy of the phallus.5

In his subsequent development, however, it was not to homosexuality that our young libertine proceeded, but to an energetic masculinity with traits of polygamy; he knew how to vary his behaviour, too, with his varying feminine objects - audaciously aggressive in one case, languishing and bashful in another. His affection had moved from his mother on to other objects of love, but at a time when there was a scarcity of these it returned to her, only to break down in a neurosis. It was not until this happened that it became evident to what a pitch of intensity his love for his mother had developed and through what vicissitudes it had passed. The sexual aim which he pursued with his girl playmates, of sleeping with them, had originated in relation to his mother. It was expressed in words which might be retained in maturity, though they would then bear a richer connotation.¹ The boy had found his way to object-love in the usual manner from the care he had received when he was an infant; and a new pleasure had now become the most important for him - that of sleeping beside his mother. I should like to emphasize the importance of pleasure derived from cutaneous contact as a component in this new aim of Hans’s, which, according to the nomenclature (artificial to my mind) of Moll, would have to be described as satisfaction of the instinct of contrectation.

¹ [The German ‘bei jemandem schlafen’, literally ‘to sleep with some one’, is used (like the English ‘to lie with’) in the sense of ‘to copulate with’.]6

In his attitude towards his father and mother Hans confirms in the most concrete and uncompromising manner what I have said in my Interpretation of Dreams and in my Three Essays with regard to the sexual relations of a child to his parents. Hans really was a little Oedipus who wanted to have his father ‘out of the way’, to get rid of him, so that he might be alone with his beautiful mother and sleep with her. This wish had originated during his summer holidays, when the alternating presence and absence of his father had drawn Hans’s attention to the condition upon which depended the intimacy with his mother which he longed for. At that time the form taken by the wish had been merely that his father should ‘go away’; and at a later stage it became possible for his fear of being bitten by a white horse to attach itself directly on to this form of the wish, owing to a chance impression which he received at the moment of some one else’s departure. But subsequently (probably not until they had moved back to Vienna, where his father’s absences were no longer to be reckoned on) the wish had taken the form that his father should be permanently away - that he should be ‘dead’. The fear which sprang from this death-wish against his father, and which may thus be said to have had a normal motive, formed the chief obstacle to the analysis until it was removed during the conversation in my consulting-room.¹

¹ It is quite certain that Hans’s two associations, ‘raspberry syrup’ and ‘a gun for shooting people dead with’ must have had more than one set of determinants. They probably had just as much to do with his hatred of his father as with his constipation complex. His father, who himself guessed the latter connection, also suggested that ‘raspberry syrup’ might be related to ‘blood’.7

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