Contributions to the neue freie presse 9 страница

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.8

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 (1920g) and The Ego and the Id (1923b). 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.

(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.

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