Freud's Case Study
Freud's Case Study
Freud's Case Study
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be separated from his mother, and when he went out the following
day—this time with his mother—quickly became distressed and insisted
on being taken home. When his mother pushed him for a reason (he
could no longer be upset about the separation from her, as they had
been together the whole time), Herbert replied, “I was afraid a horse
would bite me.” By the next morning, he was refusing to leave the
house, afraid of seeing a horse. So began what is probably the most
famous case study of an infantile phobia in the history of psychiatry—
Freud’s “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy,” better known
as “Little Hans.”
But even before that fateful walk in the park, little Herbert was
already the object of intense scrutiny, thanks to the close relationship
between his family and a certain Dr. Sigmund Freud. Herbert’s father,
Max Graf (1875–1958), was a music critic living in Vienna, who met
Freud in 1900 while Freud was treating a lady Graf knew (possibly his
future wife). In his “Reminiscences of Professor Sigmund Freud,” Graf
(1942) describes how he became actively involved in Freud’s circle
during the period 1902–1911 as one of Freud’s “closest adherents,”
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taking part especially in the attempt to use psychoanalysis to
understand the process of creativity (for a review of Graf’s writings on
music, see Abrams 1993). After Graf’s marriage, Freud “took the
warmest part in all family events,” even bringing Graf’s son, Herbert,
a rocking horse for his third birthday (Graf 1942, p. 474).
About Max Graf ’s wife, Olga Hönig, little is known, although
she had been treated by Freud, who describes her as a “beauti-
ful” woman and an “excellent and devoted mother” ( Freud 1909,
pp. 27–28).1 Herbert himself, who grew up to be a stage director at
New York’s Metropolitan Opera, was born in 1903. His godfather was
the composer Gustav Mahler, but it was Freud himself who persuaded the
family not to baptize their child as a Christian, a common practice in
the anti-Semitic atmosphere of Vienna at that time (Graf 1942, p. 473).
From 1906, when Herbert was still only two, his father began send-
ing Freud regular observations of his son’s development, focusing
especially on his growing curiosity about sexual matters—where
1 Jean Bergeret (1987) has speculated that Hans’s mother may have been the real
figure behind the “Katharina” of Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud
1895), but this view is based more on thematic similarities than on any historical
evidence and would seem to clash with Anny Katan’s view that Mrs. Graf was still
in analysis with Freud at the time her husband was sending Freud observations of
their son’s development (Frankiel 1991).
RE-READING "LITTLE HANS"
babies come from and the difference between boys and girls.2 But
Herbert’s importance to Freud increased dramatically early in January
1908, when, following the incident in the Stadtpark, Max Graf wrote to
Professor Freud to tell him that the observations he was now making of
his son had become “material for a case history” (Freud 1909, p. 22).
The publication of this case study in 1909 came at an important
time for Freud. With the initiation of the Wednesday Meetings of the
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1902, Freud had systematically begun
to ask his colleagues to observe and study the children around them in
order to gain empirical support for his emerging ideas about dreams,
the unconscious, and the origin of neurosis. This task became more
urgent after the publication of the chapter on infantile sexuality in
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud 1905), as almost all
of Freud’s data came from reconstructions from adult analyses, a fact
widely criticized in contemporary reviews. For Freud it became a
necessity to find empirical support for his ideas about polymorphous
perversity, the castration complex, and infantile sexuality through
direct observation of infants and children, and no child did more to
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offer this evidence than Herbert Graf.
But the role of little Hans in formulating important aspects of psycho-
analytic theory was not to end with Freud. Following Freud’s lead,
several major post-Freudian psychoanalytic innovators have presented
their own understanding of the origin of psychopathology and the
nature of the mind by way of re-readings of the case of Little Hans.
In this way, each new generation of psychoanalysts has been able to
revisit the case study in the light of their contemporary preoccupa-
tions, making use of the same primary data but emphasizing different
elements and reinterpreting key moments.
In this paper I will trace the way that a number of major psycho-
analysts have revisited “The Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-
Old Boy,” showing how each re-reading has thrown new light on
the case while also challenging earlier psychoanalytic paradigms.
By seeing how four key figures—Freud himself, Melanie Klein,
John Bowlby, and Jacques Lacan—have written about Little Hans,
2 Freud made use of these observations of “little Herbert” in his 1907 paper “The
Sexual Enlightenment of Children,” and again in his revolutionary work “On
“the Sexual Theories of Children” (1908), where he spoke for the first time about
concepts such as the “castration complex,” the “phallic woman,” and the “sadistic
view of coition.”
Nicholas Midgley
him” (p. 123), wishes deriving from his sense that his father was both
an interferer with his sexual wishes and an obstacle to his exclusive
attachment to his mother. When Hans had recently seen a horse falling
down in the street, Freud reconstructs, he must have wished that his
father might fall down in the same way and die, a thought that would
have put Hans in internal conf lict with his loving and affectionate
feelings toward his father.
For Freud the description of this boy’s fantasies and anxieties
conf irmed the centrality of castration and the oedipus complex to
the origin of the anxiety neuroses “in the most concrete and un-
compromising manner” (p. 111). The intensification of his libidinal
longings, when faced by the threat of castration, led to a sudden repres-
sion of libido and its transformation into anxiety.
This theory of anxiety, which links it intimately to the problem of
libido, was a central aspect of Freud’s earliest model of repression, the
oedipus complex, and the infantile neuroses. But it was soon to be chal-
lenged—and the theory of anxiety revised—by way of a re-reading of
the case study of Little Hans by the first great psychoanalytic revision-
541
ist—Sigmund Freud himself.
Perhaps it is inevitable that Freud did not wait for others to reinterpret
his case study, but began the process himself—in particular, by revis-
iting the role that anxiety and the ego play in the origin of neuroses,
especially the infantile phobias.
The theory of anxiety outlined in the 1909 case study illustrated
what Freud was later to call his “first theory of anxiety”: that when libido
becomes intensified and threatens to overwhelm the ego, a process of
repression sets in that leads to the unacceptable wish becoming un-
conscious and the loving feelings being transformed into anxiety. When
Freud (1926) came to revise this theory, in “Inhibitions, Symptoms
and Anxiety,” he returned to the case of little Hans in order to work
out his new understanding of the origin of neurotic symptoms.
On first reading it may not be apparent how profoundly revolu-
tionary this work is. Freud begins by confronting a simple problem: if
the anxiety felt in a phobia is due to the transformation of libido,
how does this relate to the anxiety felt in the face of more “realistic”
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3 This view of the ego is, of course, elaborated in Anna Freud’s The Ego and the
Mechanisms of Defence (1936), where she discusses the case of Little Hans to illus-
trate the defense mechanism of “denial in phantasy.” In a later paper, Anna Freud
argued “that the importance of Little Hans” lies in the fact that it opened up “a new
branch of psychoanalysis” (1980, p. 278). A casual reader might assume this to mean
the analytic treatment of children, a new branch of psychoanalysis that Anna Freud
was instrumental in developing. But in this paper she is explicit that she means
something quite different—the evolution of psychoanalysis itself “from a psycho-
pathology to a developmental psychology” (p. 281). This evolution, she might have
added, was her own life’s work, exemplified by her account of Little Hans, where
she focuses on what the case can tell us about the normal mechanisms of defense
employed by children in the process of development. Moreover, by shifting her
focus to defenses against painful affects rather than unacceptable drives (even if
theoretically she insisted that affects were merely an expression of drive activity),
Anna Freud opened up the way for the study of the ego’s reaction to all kinds of
anxiety situations, moving psychoanalysis into an area that she was later to term
“beyond the infantile neurosis.”
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about the fourth year of life, and that the anxiety reaction to danger situ-
ations itself far predates this time.
Klein herself turns to the earliest phobias of childhood to find a
solution to this problem. Referring to Freud’s comment in “Inhibitions,
Symptoms and Anxiety” that such early childhood phobias have “so far
not been explained” by the psychoanalytic theories available at the time
(Klein 1932, p. 156), Klein argues that these phobias actually relate
to the very earliest anxiety situations of the infantile mind, associated
with fears of violent objects, both external and introjected. In the animal
phobias, these anxieties are an attempt to modify the fear of a terrify-
ing, anal-sadistic id and superego, first by ejecting them into the out-
side world, and then displacing them onto the figure of an animal, often
in a modified form: “What lies at the root of a phobia,” she writes,
clearly differentiating herself from Freud, “is ultimately an internal
danger. It is the person’s fear of his own destructive instinct and of his
introjected parents” (p. 158).
Hans’s phobia, Klein tells us, was “readily dissipated by a short
piece of analysis” because he had been able to modify these early
545
psychotic anxieties as his relationship to his parents and to his
environment was “very good” and his general development was
progressing (pp. 158–159). The anxiety-animal (the horse) was “not
a terrifying one in itself ,” and the phobia exhibited “only a few traces
of that type of anxiety which belongs to the earliest stages,” anxieties
that had already been quite successfully modified (p. 158). But even
here, Klein suggests, the earliest anxiety situations are still latent,
to a greater or lesser degree, and the phobic anxiety can be under-
stood as relating to early sadistic fantasies and the anxieties associated
with them.
Klein’s re-reading of the case challenges Freud’s view of the
phallic/oedipal origins of the infantile neurosis—as well as his under-
standing of the origin of anxiety—on the basis of the very same case
material that Freud used to provide “conclusive evidence” for his own
point of view. Klein’s attention to the early fantasies that underlie
Hans’s more developed anxieties paved the way for a new understand-
ing of what Grotstein (1982) has called the “archaic matriarchal
Oedipus,” one in which the very earliest stages of development, and
in particular the relationship with the mother, plays a far more central
part in psychoanalytic theory than it had done previously. Long before
she had introduced the concepts of the “paranoid-schizoid” and the
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( p. 350).4 He suggests that the hints Freud offers for thinking about
separation anxiety as a primary anxiety fell on “stony ground” among
psychoanalysts developing their own ideas at the time this work was
published, and that Freud’s belated recognition of the importance of
separation anxiety has not sufficiently been incorporated into later
psychoanalytic theorizing. According to Bowlby, even Klein (with her
view of anxiety in terms of the death instinct and as secondary to
aggression) had formed her views of anxiety prior to the publication of
“Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” and was therefore not substan-
tially influenced by it (Bowlby 1973, pp. 28, 384–389).
As Melanie Klein had done in 1932, Bowlby (1973) notes how
Freud, toward the end of “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” com-
ments on the “puzzling phobias of early childhood,” giving as examples
the fear of the dark or of being left alone with strangers, neither of
which is easily intelligible in terms of the theory of anxiety as a response
to instinctual danger situations (p. 83). Bowlby implies that Freud
himself sensed that his explanation of such phenomena had not been
entirely satisfactory, so leaving the way open for Bowlby himself—as
547
it had been for Klein before him—to of fer a more satisfactory expla-
nation, this time in terms of the theory of “attachment.”
In volume two of Attachment and Loss, Bowlby (1973) turns
to the case of Little Hans to give his own explanation of those
“puzzling phobias of early childhood.” He begins by arguing that
most cases commonly labeled as childhood phobias are mislabeled,
as what is most feared is often not simply the presence of some
particular situation, but rather the absence of a “secure base.” These
conditions can better be understood as “anxiety states” and, perhaps
more specifically, as reactions to separation anxiety ( pp. 259–263).
For Bowlby, separation anxiety is “the inescapable corollary of
attachment behaviour—the other side of the coin” (Bowlby 1960,
p. 102).
4According to this view, anxiety about loss of the object is not primary, but
rather occurs as a consequence of the danger to the infant that bodily needs will not
be gratified. This will then lead to an “economic disturbance [for the infant] caused
by the accumulation of amounts of stimulation which require to be disposed of”
(Freud 1926, p. 138). The anxiety, then, is primarily related to the physiological
needs of the child to maintain drive-equilibrium, and this anxiety is merely displaced
onto the “condition which determined that situation, viz. the loss of the object,” in a
secondary way (p. 138).
Nicholas Midgley
Bowlby points out that Hans had faced real threats from his parents
that they would leave if he was naughty, leading him to express anxiety
about the possible disappearance of both his mother and his father.
But in the 1909 case study, Hans’s father, concurring with Freud,
interprets these anxieties as expressing an underlying oedipal wish to
get rid of his father. Bowlby disagrees, suggesting that the under-
lying anxiety is about separation. He makes a case, therefore, for
seeing Hans’s phobia as a reaction to an “anxious attachment,” one
predicated on certain real characteristics of his family environment,
threats of abandonment and separation in particular, which led to the
representation of his mother as a “potentially abandoning f igure”
(Juri 2003, p. 237). The fact that Hans’s parents, some time after the
publication of the case study, did actually get divorced, appears to
provide some justification to Hans’s anxieties about being separated
from them.
In contrast to earlier theorists, Bowlby rejects explanations of
Hans’s separation anxiety that put primary emphasis either on wish
fulfillment (Freud) or on the theory of unconscious hostile wishes
549
(Klein)—hostility that Bowlby acknowledges the child may well feel,
but only in response to threats of abandonment. From his point of
view, the child’s hostility would exacerbate separation anxiety, but this
would be secondary, the hostility merely a reaction to threats or actual
experiences of rejection or abandonment, especially from the mother.
In the original case study, Freud (1909) had described Mrs. Graf
as an “excellent and devoted mother” (p. 27–28), and argued elsewhere
that “not that many mistakes [in Hans’s upbringing] were made, and
those that did occur did not have that much to do with the neurosis.
. . . neurosis is essentially a matter of constitution” (Nunberg and Federn
1965, p. 235). Recent authors, however, writing about the case of Little
Hans explicitly from an attachment perspective, have emphasized
the degree to which both parents, but especially Hans’s mother, influ-
enced the development of his phobia through inappropriate and
harmful parenting. Lindon (1992, pp. 392–393) goes so far as to pro-
vide an appendix listing twenty-one examples from the case study of
the “parents’ pathogenic interactions with Little Hans,” including the
forceful use of laxatives and enemas, exposure to parental nudity and
sexual intercourse, threats of abandonment and castration, lying
and excessive punishment, misattunement to developmental needs,
and emotional unavailability.
Nicholas Midgley
with a potentially traumatic question, a question that takes the form, “What
does mother want from me?” It is a question, for Lacan, that leads to the
shattering of the illusory symbiosis of the so-called “preoedipal” stage—
although for Lacan “preoedipal,” as we will see, is not the right term.
According to Lacan, this early mother-child relationship is often
seen as a dual relationship, a preoedipal one. But in Lacan’s account of
this earliest stage of life (which earlier he had described in terms of the
“mirror stage”), one is already involved with a triangular structure,
which he calls the first “time” of the oedipus complex, and the child is
never alone with the mother in a truly “preoedipal” state. At this early
stage, however, the third term is not the father, but rather the “imagi-
nary phallus”—that which stands for what the mother really desires, a
role that the infant child is only too happy to fulfill. Insofar as the infant
can “be” the phallus for his mother, both infant and mother can remain
in this “game of imaginary lure.”5
For the four-year-old Hans, however, there were two “crises” that
were to shatter this imaginary “illusion”—the birth of his sister and
the discovery of what Lacan calls “the penis as real” (Newman 2001, 551
p. 119). With the first of these, as Freud recognized, Hans is suddenly
cast out from the illusory dual relationship with his mother, his role in
the game of imaginary lure seemingly taken by another. As for the
latter, his phallic masturbation leads his mother to scold him, a scold-
ing that he takes as a rejection of his penis per se. This is a situation
that makes him “fundamentally other than what is desired . . . rejected
outside of the imaginary field” (Lacan 1956–1957, quoted and trans-
lated in Newman 2001, p. 119). The world as he had known it has come
to an end, for it appears that he may “keep” his position only by losing
a significant part of him. Hans’s question, “What does mother want?”
becomes a source of great anxiety, confronting him with the enigma
of parental sexuality and his place within it. Lacan describes this
“fundamental disappointment,” explaining that Hans must come to
recognize not only “that he is not the unique object of the mother, but
also that the mother’s interest, more or less accentuated depending on the
case, is the phallus. After this recognition he also realises that the mother
is deprived, that she herself lacks precisely this object” (Lacan 1956–
1957, quoted and translated in Rodriguez 1999, p. 125).
5Freud had written about this in “On Narcissism” (1914b), when he described
the lost narcissism of the mother finding “completion” in the baby-as-penis.
Nicholas Midgley
ticular object. But what, for Lacan, is the nature of the original anxi-
ety that needs to be bound in this way? Not the anxiety that comes
from libido transformed (Freud 1909), nor the anxiety that signals
the danger of castration (Freud 1926), nor even the anxiety related
to projected aggression and subsequent fear of a retaliatory mother
(Klein 1932), although perhaps Lacan’s view comes closest to the
Kleinian formulation. For Lacan, the anxiety that Hans experiences—
almost a “nameless dread” or an existential angst—is a response to
being poised between the imaginary, oedipal triangle (mother-child-
phallus) and the symbolic oedipal quaternity (mother-child-phallus-
symbolic father). It is the point, as Lacan puts it, in his typically enig-
matic style, where “the subject is suspended between a moment where
he no longer knows where he is and a future where he will never again
be able to re-find himself” (Lacan 1956–1957, quoted and translated in
Evans 1996, p. 11).
For Lacan, all of this must be understood within the context of a
theory of psychoanalysis that puts the object, and the object relation,
at its core—yet the term means something very different from the way
553
it is used by either Klein or Bowlby. As Newman has noted, Lacan’s
account of the case of little Hans comes in his seminars on the topic
of the “object relation,” where Lacan is trying to offer an understand-
ing of the early mother-infant relationship alternative to that offered
by the emerging object relations school of psychoanalysis in Britain,
which he saw as intellectually weak (Newman 2001, p. 117).
Lacan opposed the idea of seeing object relations in terms of a
series of “real” relationships to “real” objects, yet his emphasis on the
early mother-infant relationship and the link between separation and
anxiety was shared by many of his psychoanalytic contemporaries
in the object relations school during the 1950s. What Lacan was argu-
ing for, however, was an understanding of object relations that did
not neglect the unconscious and that remained aware of Freud’s central
insights into the structuring role of the father, at both an individual and
a symbolic level.6
6 Since the time that Bowlby and Lacan were writing, in the 1950s and 1960s, the
theoretical “unity” of psychoanalysis—if it ever really existed at all—has become
much more fragmented, and psychoanalytic models can no longer be divided along
clear theoretical lines. At the same time, one can see a certain coming together,
or acceptance, of certain fundamental ideas across the range of different psycho-
analytic schools, and this is reflected in the various contemporary readings of the
case of Little Hans. For example, almost all contemporary readings—whatever their
Nicholas Midgley
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
7The way in which this shift of emphasis took place within Freud’s own work
may be explored historically, by comparing the different ways in which Freud
himself defined the “core of psychoanalysis” at different points in his life. In 1914,
before the major splits in the psychoanalytic movement, Freud wrote that “any line
of investigation that recognises these two facts [i.e., the facts of transference and
of resistance] and takes them as the starting-point of its work has the right to
call itself psycho-analysis, even though it arrives at results other than my own”
(Freud 1914a, quoted by Bergmann 1997, p. 75). By 1923, after a series of splits and
the establishment of the “secret committee” to defend the “truth” of psychoanalysis
against its potential enemies, Freud defined psychoanalysis very differently. He
wrote that the theories of unconscious mental processes, resistance and repression,
the centrality of sexuality, and the oedipus complex are the “principal subject-matter
of psycho-analysis. . . . No one who cannot accept them all should count himself a
psycho-analyst” (Freud 1923, quoted in Bergmann 1997, p. 76). We can see here a
shift in definition from psychoanalysis as a process of investigation (with poten-
tially different discoveries emerging from it) to a set of beliefs, which have to be
either accepted or rejected. It is this transition that marks the “birth of psycho-
analytic orthodoxy” (Bergmann 1997), and that Devereux, in his wonderful book,
From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (1967), recognizes as the
eclipse of the true originality of the psychoanalytic project.
RE-READING "LITTLE HANS"
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