Freud - Complete Works (360 page)

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

2093

   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.

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

2094

   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 (1923
e
) 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
.

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

2095

   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’.]

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

2096

   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’.

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

2097

   But Hans was not by any means a
bad character; he was not even one of those children who at his age
still give free play to the propensity towards cruelty and violence
which is a constituent of human nature. On the contrary, he had an
unusually kind-hearted and affectionate disposition; his father
reported that the transformation of aggressive tendencies into
feelings of pity took place in him at a very early age. Long before
the phobia he had become uneasy when he saw the horses in a
merry-go-round being beaten; and he was never unmoved if any one
wept in his presence. At one stage in the analysis a piece of
suppressed sadism made its appearance in a particular
context:¹ but it was
suppressed
sadism, and we shall
presently have to discover from the content what it stood for and
what it was meant to replace. And Hans deeply loved the father
against whom he cherished these death-wishes; and while his
intellect demurred to such a contradiction,² he could not help
demonstrating the fact of its existence, by hitting his father and
immediately afterwards kissing the place he had hit. We ourselves,
too, must guard against making a difficulty of such a
contradiction. The emotional life of man is in general made up of
pairs of contraries such as these.³ Indeed, if it were not so,
repressions and neuroses would perhaps never come about. In the
adult these pairs of contrary emotions do not as a rule become
simultaneously conscious except at the climaxes of passionate love;
at other times they usually go on suppressing each other until one
of them succeeds in keeping the other altogether out of sight. But
in children they can exist peaceably side by side for quite a
considerable time.

  
¹
His wanting to beat and tease
horses.

  
²
See the critical question he addressed to
his father (
p. 2033
).

  
³
             
Das heisst, ich bin kein ausgeklügelt Buch.

                 
Ich bin ein Mensch mit seinem Widerspruch.

                 
C. F. Meyer,
Huttens letzte Tage
.

                 
[In fact, I am no clever work of fiction;

                  
I am a man, with all his contradiction.]

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

2098

   The most important influence upon
the course of Hans’s psychosexual development was the birth
of a baby sister when he was three and a half years old. That event
accentuated his relations to his parents and gave him some
insoluble problems to think about; and later, as he watched the way
in which the infant was looked after, the memory-traces of his own
earliest experiences of pleasure were revived in him. This
influence, too, is a typical one: in an unexpectedly large number
of life-histories, normal as well as pathological, we find
ourselves obliged to take as our starting-point an outburst of
sexual pleasure and sexual curiosity connected, like this one, with
the birth of the next child. Hans’s behaviour towards the new
arrival was just what I have described in
The Interpretation of
Dreams
. In his fever a few days later he betrayed how little he
liked the addition to the family. Affection for his sister might
come later,¹ but his first attitude was hostility. From that
time forward fear that yet another baby might arrive found a place
among his conscious thoughts. In the neurosis, his hostility,
already suppressed, was represented by a special fear - a fear of
the bath. In the analysis he gave undisguised expression to his
death-wish against his sister, and was not content with allusions
which required supplementing by his father. His inner conscience
did not consider this wish so wicked as the analogous one against
his father; but it is clear that in his unconscious he treated both
persons in the same way, because they both took his mummy away from
him, and interfered with his being alone with her.

   Moreover, this event and the
feelings that were revived by it gave a new direction to his
wishes. In his triumphant final phantasy he summed up all of his
erotic wishes, both those derived from his auto-erotic phase and
those connected with his object-love. In that phantasy he was
married to his beautiful mother and had innumerable children whom
he could look after in his own way.

  
¹
Cf. his plans of what he would do when his
sister was old enough to speak (
p. 2060
).

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

2099

(II)

   One day while Hans was in the
street he was seized with an attack of anxiety. He could not yet
say what it was he was afraid of; but at the very beginning of this
anxiety-state he betrayed to his father his motive for being ill,
the advantage he derived from it. He wanted to stay with his mother
and to coax with her; his recollection that he had also been
separated from her at the time of the baby’s birth may also,
as his father suggests, have contributed to his longing. It soon
became evident that his anxiety was no longer reconvertible into
longing; he was afraid even when his mother went with him. In the
meantime indications appeared of what it was to which his libido
(now changed into anxiety) had become attached. He gave expression
to the quite specific fear that a white horse would bite him.

   Disorders of this kind are called
‘phobias’, and we might classify Hans’s case as
an agoraphobia if it were not for the fact that it is a
characteristic of that complaint that the locomotion of which the
patient is otherwise incapable can always be easily performed when
he is accompanied by some specially selected person - in the last
resort, by the physician. Hans’s phobia did not fulfil this
condition; it soon ceased having any relation to the question of
locomotion and became more and more clearly concentrated upon
horses. In the early days of his illness, when the anxiety was at
its highest pitch, he expressed a fear that ‘the
horse’ll come into the room’, and it was this that
helped me so much towards understanding his condition.