Little Hans
In the early 20th century Sigmund Freud was under pressure to provide evidence to support his theories from client cases. With Dora, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Daniel Paul Schreber, Freud explored similar themes including bisexuality moving between heterosexuality and homosexuality where both environmental challenges, hormonal changes and sexual opportunities availed themselves. And for males, Freud described an intimidation or castration complex where sexuality is affected by traumas of pride. His emphasis on these themes continued with Little Hans, The Ratman, and The Wolfman. With Little Hans, Herbert Graf, Freud was at a disadvantage because he had not yet developed the skills to be a great child Psychoanalyst, so he relied on notes from parents to record their kid’s thinking and behaviour patterns. “While I myself supervised the overall plan of treatment and also intervened personally on one occasion by talking to the lad myself, the treatment itself was carried out by the little boy’s father.” Freud admitted that “…no one else could have persuaded the child to admit so freely to his feelings and nothing could replace the expertise with which the father was able to interpret the utterances of his 5-year-old son: the technical difficulties of carrying out the psychoanalysis of so young a patient would have been insurmountable.” Herbert was the son of Max Graf, the music critic, and Olga Hönig who provided most of the material for the analysis. “His parents, who were both among my closest followers, had agreed to bring up their first child with no more constraint than proved necessary to maintain decent behaviour, and as the child developed into a cheerful, good-natured and bright little boy, they proceeded quite happily with their attempt to let him grow and express himself without intimidation.”
Infantile Sexuality – Freud: https://psychreviews.org/sexuality-part-2-infantile-sexuality-sigmund-freud/
Sexual theories of children
One of the theories that Freud had to defend was his theories of how children developed sexually before puberty. In Freud’s time it was more common to believe that sexuality only begins with puberty. Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year old Boy, was published a few years after his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud’s Oral Phase coincides with breast feeding and an early sexual organization. The review of Little Hans takes place in the period of the Phallic phase, around ages 3 – 4, when children obsess about the penis, sexual differences between men and women and early sexual theories, like that of the stork. Children can be direct with their questions, with parents in most cases misdirecting them with inaccurate answers. Freud recounts notes from Hans’s parents:
Hans, aged 3 3/4: ‘Daddy, have you got a widdler too?’
Father: ‘Of course I have.’
Hans: ‘But I’ve never seen it when you get undressed.’
On another occasion he watches with fascination while his mother undresses at bedtime. She asks ‘Whatever are you looking at?’
Hans: ‘I’m just looking to see if you’ve got a widdler too.’
Mummy: ‘Of course I have. Didn’t you know that?’
Hans: ‘No, I thought because you’re so big you must have a widdler like a horse’s.'”
Freud then moves to the castration complex where early masturbation is punished. “At the same time [Hans’s] interest in widdlers is not just theoretical: as we might surmise, it stimulates him to touch that organ as well. At the age of 3 1/2 his mother catches him with his hand on his penis. She threatens him: ‘If you do that, I’ll tell Dr. A. to come and he’ll cut off your widdler. What will you do then when you have to widdle?’
Hans: ‘I’ll use my botty.'”
“He responds without any sense of guilt as yet, but acquires on this occasion the ‘castration complex’ that is so often to be inferred from the analysis of neurotics, even though without exception they strenuously resist any acknowledgement of it.”
Hans continued noticing penises everywhere including on giraffe’s, a cow’s udder, and horses.
“I draw a giraffe for Hans… He says to me, ‘You must draw his widdler.’ I reply, ‘Draw it on yourself.’ At this he adds a new line to the picture of the giraffe, which at first he leaves short but then adds another line to it, remarking, ‘His widdler is longer than that.’ Hans and I walk past a horse which is urinating. He says, ‘The horse’s widdler is down below, like mine.’ He watches his 3-month-old sister being bathed and says pityingly, ‘Her widdler is really really tiny.’ He is given a doll to play with, and undresses her. He looks at her carefully and says, ‘Her widdler is only really tiny.'”
Sibling rivalry
“…brothers ought not to pursue honours or powers from the same sources but from different ones. ~ Peter Walcot paraphrasing Plutarch (Moralia 486 B & C)
Hans’s father Max describes the reactions of his little Herbert with a new inclusion to the family. “Hans is very jealous of the new arrival and as soon as anyone praises her, finds her pretty, etc., he replies scornfully: ‘But she hasn’t got any teeth yet.’ For when he saw her for the first time he was astonished that she was unable to speak and assumed that the reason she could not speak was because she did not have any teeth. In the early days after the birth he finds himself having to play second fiddle, of course, and suddenly comes down with a very sore throat. In his fever he is heard to say: ‘But I don’t want a little sister!’ It takes about six months for him to get over his jealousy, after which he becomes as affectionate towards Hanna as he is conscious of his own superiority.” Here we have the sources of jealousy being insecurity over sources of pleasurable attention and the cure coming from the older sibling being able to find their own superiority to regain security. As long as the child cannot find their own distinctive superiority there will be continued resentment based on the feeling of being replaced by the younger sibling. Conflict is reduced when different talents are developed within different siblings then the conflict can only be escalated again if parents stupidly refuse to acknowledge the value of those different talents and start picking favourites. This lesson extends outwards beyond family to the economy. A peaceful society is one where all the world’s cultures are able to trade differences with each other in such a way that as many individuals in society gain a sense of security. Economic crashes and limited varieties of industries can create jealous and envious tensions in the world. These tensions can create war, revolution, and even more subtle problems like chronic unemployment and psychological problems. Freud quotes another older child in his notes in the paper as saying of his younger brother that “the stork can take him back again.”
Envy and the Greeks: A study of Human Behaviour by Peter Walcot: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780856681462/
Jealous Pets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_D84wPZ9BU
Bisexuality
“Hans’s 5-year-old cousin is here on a visit. Hans, now 4, embraces him continually and during one of these tender embraces and says, ‘Oh, I do love you.’ This is the first instance of homosexuality that we shall encounter in Hans, but certainly not the last. Our little Hans is apparently the epitome of all the vices! We have moved to a new apartment. (Hans is 4.) A door leads from our kitchen to a narrow balcony, from which one can see into the apartment on the opposite side of the courtyard. Here Hans has discovered a little girl of 7 or 8. Now he sits on the step leading to the balcony waiting to adore her, and will sit there for hours. At 4 O’Clock in particular, when the little girl comes home from school, we cannot keep him in the room, nor stop him from taking up his observation post. On one occasion, when the little girl does not appear at the window at the usual time, Hans becomes very agitated and plagues the servants with questions: ‘When is the little girl coming home? Where is she?’, etc. When she finally appears he is ecstatic and cannot take his eyes off the apartment opposite. The passion with which Hans embarked on this ‘love at a distance’ can be explained by the fact that Hans has no little playmate, boy or girl. Frequent contact with other children is obviously a necessary part of a child’s normal development.”
“Shortly afterwards we leave to spend the summer in Gmunden and Hans (4 1/2) now has company. His playmates are our landlord’s the next-door children, Anna (10) and two other little girls whose names I cannot recall, who are about 9 and 7. His favourite is Fritzl, whom he often embraces and assures of his love. On one occasion he is asked, ‘Which of the little girls do you like best?’ and answers ‘Fritzl’. At the same time he is very aggressive towards the girls, swaggers and acts the man, embraces them and smothers them with kisses, which Berta for one very much enjoys. One evening, as Berta is coming out of the room he puts his arms round her neck and says in the sweetest of voices, ‘You’re so lovely, Berta’; however, this does not stop him from kissing the others and assuring them of his love too. He is also very fond of Mariedl, another of the landlord’s daughters who plays with him; she is about 14, and one evening as he is being put to bed he says, ‘I want Mariedl to sleep with me.’ When he is told, ‘She can’t do that’, he says, ‘I want her to sleep with Mummy or Daddy, then.’ He is told, ‘She can’t do that either, Mariedl must sleep downstairs with her parents’.”
“On the following occasion, too, Hans said to his Mummy, ‘You know, I should so like to sleep with that little girl.’ The occasion gives rise to great amusement, for Hans behaves just like a grown-up in love. For some days a pretty little girl, about 8 years old, has been coming into the restaurant where we have lunch, and Hans has of course immediately fallen in love with her. He is constantly turning round on his chair to look at her out of the corner of his eye; he goes over to stand near her and flirt as soon as he has eaten, but goes bright scarlet if anyone catches him at it. If the little girl returns his glance he immediately looks in the opposite direction, covered in shame. His behaviour occasions hilarity, of course, in all the restaurant guests. Every day when we take him into the restaurant he asks, ‘Do you think the little girl will be here today?’ When she finally comes he goes as red as any adult in the same situation. On one occasion he comes over to me, quite blissful, and whispers in my ear: ‘I know where the little girl lives. I’ve seen her go up the steps in such and such a place.’ While he may behave aggressively towards the little girls at home, here he is altogether the platonically languishing beau. This may have something to do with the fact that the girls at home are village children, while this one is a lady of refinement. I have already mentioned that he once said he would like to sleep with her.”
Freud’s male homosexual theory
Freud continued his theory of male homosexuality by connecting early sexual theories of children where everyone is expected to have a penis. When the penis is then made the prime importance of sexual pleasure, associated with the loving connection of the mother, later discoveries of the vagina and clitoris lead to a disappointment. The desire for a “woman with a penis”, as Freud puts it, moves to the new object which is feminine looking male. Of course Freud is in the early days of sexual orientation psychology, but some clues to biology appear in his review of Daniel Paul Schreber’s book that show that stress and age related hormonal changes can also affect an adult’s sexual orientation even if they were married to a woman and had regular sex with the desire to have a baby. [See: Daniel Paul Schreber: https://rumble.com/v1gu84v-case-studies-daniel-paul-schreber-freud-and-beyond.html] The complexity of sexual orientation is only starting to be unraveled. There are patterns but many people have very individual experiences with their choice of sexual objects and some of confusion has to do with ignorance of biology. At this point in time Freud sticks with his theory of the fluidity of objects and doesn’t posit a homosexual drive, or instinct. Instincts for Freud are biological drives to action. “It is quite inappropriate to single out one particular homosexual drive; it is not a peculiarity of his drives that distinguishes the homosexual, but his choice of object.” Here Freud pushes a desire for better sexual education of children. Freud says “Hans is homosexual, as all children may very well be, quite in accordance with the undeniable fact that he only knows of one kind of genitalia, genitalia like his own.”
Freud then observes Hans’s exploration of other girls where he’s more bold in some cases, or remains at a distance with yearning. His desire to sleep with them connects with his desire to be in bed with his mother, and Freud even equates the term to “sleep with someone” as an adult term that comes from childhood connections of sleeping in bed with mummy.
Baby wants Blue Velvet – Isabella Rosselini and Dennis Hopper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=senNDipdmPo
Little Oedipus
Freud also asserts that when there is a “paucity of other objects of love” children can revert, for example, back to their mother. This hints that Freud’s theory views sexuality as something that looks for convenient objects. If parents are the only ones around, then children target their desires towards them. When other children are around, then new targets are made. For example, during summer months in “Gmunden, when his father’s alternating presence and absence drew his attention to the conditions that determined that longed-for intimacy with his mother. Later…when Hans could no longer count on his father’s going away, the wish was intensified until its content was that his father should go away for good, should be ‘dead’.” Yet there was some ambivalence toward his father as Freud describes. “Hans feels an intense love for the father against whom he harbours a death-wish, and while his intelligence may lead him to query this contradiction, he is still obliged to demonstrate its reality by hitting his father and then immediately kissing the place where he had hit him.” His father recounts…
“Hans, 4 1/4 years old. This morning his mummy gives Hans a bath, as she does every day, then dries him and pats him with talcum powder. As she puts talcum powder around his penis, taking care not to touch it, Hans says, ‘Why don’t you touch me there?”
Mummy: ‘Because that’s dirty.’
Hans: ‘What? Dirty? Why?’
Mummy: ‘Because it’s not decent.’
Hans (laughing): ‘It’s fun, though.'”
“Being helped to do a widdle, which involves unfastening the child’s trousers and taking out his penis, is obviously a pleasurable activity for Hans. When they are out on a walk it is of course mainly his father who helps Hans in this way, which provides an opportunity for his homosexual tendencies to become fixed on his father.”
“Yesterday, when I took Hans for a wee he asked me for the first time to take him behind the house so that no one could see, and added, ‘Last year, when I did a widdle, Berta and Olga watched me.’ I take this to mean that last year he enjoyed it when the girls watched him, but doesn’t any more. The pleasure of exhibitionism is now being repressed. The repression in real life of his desire to be seen – or helped – by Berta and Olga when he is doing a widdle, explains why it has turned up in his dreams…Since then I have repeatedly observed that he does not wish to be seen when doing a widdle.”
“Hans (4 1/2) is again watching his little sister being bathed and starts to laugh. Asked, ‘Why are you laughing?’ he replies, ‘I’m laughing at Hanna’s widdler.’ ‘Why?’ – ‘Because her widdler’s so lovely.’ Obviously this is not what he means. Hanna’s widdler actually struck him as funny. This is incidentally the first time he acknowledges the difference between male and female genitals, instead of denying it.”
Cat showing ambivalence with licking and biting (3:28): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6yngs4woPw
Equinophobia
As the analysis continued Hans’s father noticed a phobia begin in his son. “Sexual over-excitement caused by his mother’s caresses is no doubt at the root of the problem, but I am at a loss to identify the immediate cause of the disorder. The fear that a horse will bite him on the street seems connected in some way to fear of a large penis – you will recall from my earlier notes that he was aware at a very early stage of the horse’s large penis and came to the conclusion that, as she is so big, his mother must have a widdler like a horse’s.” Freud makes some connections to a dream of Hans’s where he loses his mother and is not able to nuzzle with her. This is conflated with the large widdler he assumes his mother has and his hope that “when I get bigger my widdler will grow too.” Freud concludes “that he has constantly made comparisons in the course of his observations and remains deeply dissatisfied with the size of his own widdler. He is reminded of this defect by the big animals, which he dislikes for that reason. Since he is probably unable to become fully conscious of this whole train of thought, the painful feeling is transformed into anxiety, so that his present anxiety builds as much on his earlier pleasure as on his present aversion. When once a state of anxiety has been created, anxiety devours all other feelings; as repression takes its course and those once-conscious ideas to which strong feelings have become attached move more and more into the unconscious mind, all the associated emotions may be transformed into anxiety.” The repression to not think about the distressing thoughts is motivated by the desire to stop the anxiety. Reminders in the world that connect back to thoughts of a small widdler, including the memory of the threat of castration by the mother, and more recently his first knowledge that girls have different genitalia, and the possibility that he could be widdler-less like them, creates a phobia over any reminder of inferiority. The horse becomes a trigger for anxiety related to inferiority.
Further questioning led to a memory of a horse collapsing while shopping with this mom. Hans imagined that the horse could both bite him or collapse. Freud interpreted the collapsed horse being the father dying so Hans could take his place, but at the same time there was an ambivalence because he also loves his father. Mixed with memories of seeing children hop up on horse driven carts and onto loading ramps, Hans fantasized a danger of the cart moving away just as he hopped onto one and send him crashing down. The horse, or the father, is the incest barrier to the mother. “Behind the original expression of anxiety, the fear that horses will collapse, and both of these, the biting horse and the falling horse, are the father who will punish him because of the wicked desires he harbours against him.”
The End – The Doors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsQtnBu3p7Y
Freud talked to Hans and laid out the characteristics of the horse compared to his father. “…I offered him a partial interpretation of his fear of horses: his father must be the horse, which he had good internal reason to fear. Certain details that aroused fear in Hans, the black around this mouth and in front of his eyes (moustache and spectacles, the prerogatives of the adult male), seemed to me to have been transferred directly from the father to the horses. With this explanation I vanquished the most powerful resistance in Hans to conscious recognition of his unconscious thoughts, since it was his own father who was taking the role of his physician. From this moment on we had conquered the summit of his condition, the material flowed abundantly, the young patient showed courage in communicating the details of his phobia and soon intervened independently in the course of the analysis.”
Fecal birth
The parents finally gave in and provided a basic sexual education talk to Hans. “On 24 April my wife and I enlighten Hans up to a point by explaining that babies grow inside the mummy and then are brought into the world like a ‘plop’ by pushing them out, and that this causes great pain. In the afternoon we go out in the street. He is clearly much relieved, running after carts and carriages, and his residual anxiety is betrayed only by the fact that he does not dare to venture far away from the main entrance, and cannot be persuaded to go for a longer walk at all.” Afterwards Hans showed an interest in being a mummy and having children. He imagined his friends being his children, including an imaginary friend Lodi. His play eventually changed his role to become the father and then eventually he bestowed the honor of grandfather and grandmother to his parents. The heavy weight of the cart being pulled by the horse in Hans’s memory had further symbolic significance for Freud. “We learn that Hans used to insist on accompanying his mother to the lavatory and that he did the same thing with Berta, who represented his mother at the time, until this was discovered and forbidden. The pleasure derived from watching a beloved person perform such functions corresponds to the ‘confluence of drives’ / instincts of which we have already seen one example in Hans’s behaviour. Hans’s father finally turns his mind to the symbolism of plop, and recognizes an analogy between a heavily laden cart and a body weighed down by faecal matter, between the way a cart drives out of the gateway and the way a stool is released from the body.” The birth of the baby is treated as a “plop” like when defecating. By use of imagination towards his parents Hans resolved his conflict with his father and mother. Later after puberty Hans will have to take his dream of being a parent and choose an object outside of the family now that he accepts that different people have to be chosen.
Influence through the power of suggestion
The main controversy with Freud’s analysis of Hans is the use of his parents as mediators. Shockingly, Freud opens up a can of worms in his paper that goes even beyond it. He makes the excuse that children are less likely to lie than adults, but his main reservation is damaging. “The analysis of a child by his own father, who is steeped in my theoretical views and tainted with my prejudices, is altogether lacking in objective value. A child is of course suggestible to a very high degree, as regards his father, perhaps, more than any other figure; he will allow any words to be put in his mouth out of gratitude to a father who pays him so much attention.” The power of suggestion can hardly be better described than that. It presages Freud’s later work and object psychology. The reason why most people have voices in their minds is from the rewards and punishments, the giving and withholding of attention from parents, caregivers and powerful people. It’s a form of conditioning where suggestions are imitated by children, and adults, to secure attention from others as a reward. This is a weakness that can be exploited by predators, confidence tricksters, cults and advertising. Any attachment wound or emptiness is open for exploitation. With enough repetition children and adults follow the family culture and the wider culture of the world. Even when the original influences are gone, the conditioning remains in the person, motivating actions unconsciously until these attachment needs are brought to consciousness and healthy sources of satisfaction are pursued. If you want to know why you are talking to people in your mind? It’s because you want to get agreement and positive attention from them in real life. Real life requires an unreal world to think in, rehearse and strategize in order to make decisions in the actual world. There are also terrible people imitated in our minds and the mind creates stress as if they are really there. They inhibit our choices and we can become like them if we believe their behaviours are rewarding enough to imitate. This is the dark side we all have to fight with and defeat. The real ghosts are impressions in our mind. A fifth column that doesn’t always have your best interest at heart.
Luke Skywalker’s vision of himself as Darth Vader: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTcLiEI3Wdg
Cult psychology: https://rumble.com/v1gvih9-cult-psychology.html
Thankfully the observer awareness in meditation can heal these influences, desires for attention, and can help to remove the identification with old cultural habits. It can provide, what Freud would later call the “I” or Ego, opportunities to make choices with a sense of play and authenticity in different directions. When people are conscious of their attachment weaknesses, they are more likely to vet choices and compare them to decide which is better, creating a more independent mind. Any basic meditation pursued for a period of time will have interruptions showing the types of objects imitated in the mind. This includes just being mindful while walking and seeing triggers and memories happen in real time. Being able to breathe through them, relax them and release them will be important to create more independence. The importance of this insight is that cults can appear anywhere there is exploitation. Followers need leaders and leaders need followers. Religious or secular sources of these suggestions that leaders provide, including psychoanalysis, all can fall under cult-like appeals to authority, where a leader is always to be believed and a follower obeys. Watching our attachment wounds and deficits can protect us from predators, especially the friendly looking ones, who are watching from a distance.
Slow boat to China: The Master – Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix: https://youtu.be/SeNU4axJOjw
How to motivate yourself – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv3zl-how-to-motivate-yourself-freud-and-beyond.html
The Wolfman and other cases – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780142437452/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/