The Case Of Little Hans

12 Key excerpts on "The Case Of Little Hans"

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  Critical Essays on Psychoanalysis

  • Stanley Rachman(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Pergamon

    (Publisher)

  He felt his position to have been greatly strengthened by this case and two generations of analysts have referred to the evidence * Reprinted from J. nerv. ment. Dis. 130, 1960 by permission of the Authors and Editor. 198 F R E U D ' S C A S E OF L I T T L E H A N S 199 of Little Hans as a basic substantiation of psychoanalytic theories (e.g. 1, 5, 7). As an example, Glover (5, p. 76) may be quoted. In its time the analysis of Little Hans was a remarkable achieve-ment and the story of the analysis constitutes one of the most valued records in psychoanalytical archives. Our concepts of phobia formation, of the positive Oedipus complex, of ambivalence, castra-tion anxiety and repression, to mention but a few, were greatly reinforced and amplified as the result of this analysis. In this paper we shall re-examine this case history and assess the evidence presented. We shall show that although there are manifestations of sexual behavior on the part of Hans, there is no scientifically acceptable evidence showing any connection between this behavior and the child's phobia for horses ; that the assertion of such connection is pure assumption ; that the elabo-rate discussions that follow from it are speculative; and that the case affords no factual support for any of the concepts listed by Glover above. Our examination of this case exposes in considerable detail patterns of thinking and attitudes to evidence that are well-nigh universal among psychoanalysts. It suggests the need for more careful scrutiny of the bases of psychoanalytic dis-coveries 99 than has been customary; and we hope it will prompt psychologists to make similar critical examinations of basic psychoanalytic writings. The case material on which Freud's analysis is based was collected by Little Hans's father, who kept Freud informed of developments by regular written reports. The father also had several consultations with Freud concerning Little Hans's phobia.

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  Six Children

  The Spectrum of Child Psychopathology and its Treatment

  • Ann G. Smolen(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter One Child analysis—a brief historical review of its development

  One of the earliest published papers about a child’s treatment was Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (Freud, 1909b), often referred as Little Hans. Little Hans’s analysis holds a special place in the history of child psychoanalysis, as it was the first case study of an infantile neurosis; however, the material was not retrieved from a reconstruction of an adult analysis, but rather was a treatment conducted by the father through Sigmund Freud’s instructions. Little Hans’s castration anxiety (his presenting symptom) and his Oedipus complex were interpreted by Freud through his understanding of his work with adult patients. Because Freud conducted the whole treatment via the father, there was no real elaboration of child analytic technique, thus confusion developed as future child analysts attempted to differentiate child guidance/parent education from child analysis. It was felt, at that time, that a troubled child was helped through his parents. Child analysts did not have a child analytic technique or a well-defined method of treatment. They struggled with differentiating between parental education and parent guidance and what was deemed child analysis. To complicate matters, there was also confusion as to the differences between child psychotherapy and child analysis. For years to come, the case study of Little Hans was the first introduction to child analysis for child psychotherapy candidates (Young-Bruehl, 2007).

  Anna Freud stated that The Case Of Little Hans “pointed toward a general theory of development” (Freud, 1980, p. 278), but did not contribute to child analytic technique. Anna Freud further clarified that her father “looked to Hans’s neurosis, his phobia, for confirmation of a hypothesis about how infantile sexuality components are the motive forces of all neurotic symptoms of later life” (Freud, 1980, p. 279). Anna Freud described her father’s hypothesis in The Infantile Neurosis when she wrote: “… conflict, followed by regression, regressive aims arousing anxiety; anxiety warded off by means of defense; conflict solution via compromise; symptoms” (Freud, 1970, p. 191). Young-Bruehl points out that Anna Freud summarizes in her book The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense

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  The Annual of Psychoanalysis, V. 29

  Sigmund Freud and His Impact on the Modern World

  • Jerome A. Winer, James W. Anderson(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In that regard she was close to her father's position in his work with Little Hans. Her eventual emphasis on analyzing defenses with children is also similar to her father's approach. Although she never deviated from the instinctual-drive theory, she paid more attention than had her father to the child's defenses and the child's adaptation to his or her environment. The more recent formulations of self psychology (Kohut, 1971) also focused on parental behavior, specifically on empathy for the child, or the lack thereof, as crucial both in normal development and in psychopathology. These controversies between the two giants of child analysis—Anna Freud and Melanie Klein—often obscured the contributions of others and interfered with a more robust development of the field. In spite of Sigmund Freud's one-dimensional technique, child analysis began with his undertaking of The Case Of Little Hans. He used the case to illustrate his ideas on infantile sexuality and to document the oedipal phase of psychosexual development. It also served to demonstrate the value of psychoanalytic developmental formulations in understanding and ameliorating neurotic symptoms. Although the primary value of the case rests on its elaboration and support of a developmental framework of infantile sexuality it also has a bearing on ego psychology, psychoanalytic developmental theory, and principles of technique in child analysis. For the clinician who works with children, The Case Of Little Hans is valuable because of two basic elements: it is a method of eliciting meaningful clinical data from a child and a developmental framework whereby these data can be organized in a useful manner. Freud's technique via the father evolved as he worked with the material presented by the child. At first, Freud suggested reassurance that the fear of horses was nonsense, and he urged the father to educate and enlighten Little Hans about sexuality

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  Reading Freud

  A Chronological Exploration of Freud's Writings

  • Jean-Michel Quinodoz(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (‘Little Hans')” (1909b)

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315783109-11

  The first ever child analysis

  This case study is an account of the very first psychoanalytical treatment of a child. It was the little boy’s father, Max Graf, who conducted the treatment of “Little Hans” (alias Herbert Graf), a quite common practice at the time. The analysis lasted from January to May 1908 and was supervised by Freud on the basis of the observations the boy’s father noted down and communicated to Freud. Freud himself took an active part on only one occasion – a discussion with both father and son which was to prove decisive. Freud wrote an account of the treatment and, with the father’s permission, published it in 1909. This article appeared in the first issue of the psychoanalytical review, the Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen, which the first Psychoanalytical Congress in Salzburg the previous year had decided to found. Though the review did not last long, it was published until the outbreak of the First World War.

  What can we learn from this case study? First, “Little Hans” provided Freud with “proof” – which he very much needed – of the accuracy of his hypotheses concerning the existence of sexuality in children in general. Second, the ability to cure a case of phobia was an excellent illustration of how the therapeutic potential of psychoanalysis could be used not only with adults but also with children.

  Biographies and history

  “Little Hans”: a brilliant career as director of opera

  Little Hans’s parents were no strangers to Freud because his mother, Olga Graf, had been analysed by Freud some years previously. Hans’s father, Max Graf, was a composer and music critic; he had met Freud in 1900 and, passionately interested in the discoveries which psychoanalysis was making, regularly took part in the meetings of the “Psychological Wednesday Society” until 1913. From 1906 on, when Little Hans was not quite 3 years old, Max Graf began sharing with Freud the observations he was making of his son. In so doing, he was acceding to Freud’s request that his closest followers should take notes on everything which had to do with infantile sexuality so as to buttress the hypotheses he had put forward in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905. Freud used some of the observations made by Little Hans’s father in two articles, “The Sexual Enlightenment of Children” (Freud

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  From Psychoanalytic Narrative to Empirical Single Case Research

  Implications for Psychoanalytic Practice

  • Horst Kächele, Joseph Schachter, Helmut Thomä(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In the context of our present methodological questions regarding the significance of the case history as a practical and scientific means of communication, the report stands out for its relatively clear separation of observation and explanatory commentary. This is due to the allocation of roles in which the father—as the therapist—reports, while Freud (1909b)—as the control analyst—provides the commentary. While the father’s interest in the analysis apparently supports attentiveness to the material being sought, at the same time a clear distinction remains in the text. It may be partly owing to this circumstance that this case of horse phobia lent itself to different interpretations by psychologists of different provenance. It speaks well of a case presentation in that it allows for alternative explanations at all. Among the psychoanalytic commentaries and alternatives that have been proposed are those of Baumeyer (1952) and Loch and Jappe (1974): Using a number of indications scattered throughout the text of the case history of Little Hans, they revealed more about the close connection between symptom formation and early suppression. However, the same case also has served to criticize the way psychoanalytic evidence has been generated (Wolpe and Rachman, 1960). In any case Gardner (1972) praises Little Hans as the most famous boy in child psychotherapy literature (p. 24). Recently centennial reviews and reconsiderations have reexamined the case in the light of newer theory (Blum, 2007; Fingert Chused, 2007; Munder Ross, 2007; Stuart, 2007; Wakefield, 2007).

  The Rat Man

  In the same year as the work about Little Hans, Freud published another comprehensive case history. In fact, his “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” (1909d) contain far more than the modest title might lead one to expect. The case of the Rat Man, Paul Lorenz, is the only one of the six long case reports to present a complete and successful treatment. This case presentation can be called exemplary in many respects. The technical difficulties in reporting, about which Freud still complains in the Dora case—how a lengthy treatment could possibly be retained in memory— were resolved. The case report is based on the daily notes that Freud was in the habit of setting down each evening. Interestingly, it is precisely in this case that Freud warns against the following:

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  Freud's Argument for the Oedipus Complex

  A Philosophy of Science Analysis of the Case of Little Hans

  • Jerome C. Wakefield(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5 Freud Versus the Fright Theory Wolpe and Rachman’s Behaviorist Challenge to Freud’s Oedipal Analysis of the Little Hans Case

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003272472-5

  It was not from a methodological objection based on suggestion or from an alternative psychoanalytic perspective but from learning theory that the most powerful attack on Freud’s interpretation of the Hans case was to come. In 1960, Joseph Wolpe and Stanley Rachman, two prominent behaviorist theorists, published what remains today by far the most influential critique of Freud’s account of the etiology of Hans’s phobia. More importantly, they presented a plausible alternative account of their own anchored in learning theory.

  Wolpe and Rachman noted that late in Hans’s analysis it emerged that, just prior to the onset of his horse phobia, Hans had witnessed a horse accident in the streets of Vienna in which a horse pulling a large bus-wagon fell down, kicking his feet. Hans reports that he was terribly frightened by this event and that his horse anxiety began immediately afterward. Based on this revelation and relying on Pavlovian/Watsonian classical conditioning theory, Wolpe and Rachman postulated that one-trial learning of fear of horses occurred when Hans witnessed the horse accident. This conditioning, they argue, fully explains the phobia without the need to appeal to Oedipal dynamics or other psychoanalytic factors. Partisans on both sides of the “Freud wars” have generally lined up either in their agreement with Wolpe and Rachman’s rival analysis or their acceptance of Freud’s pointed counterarguments, to be considered in later chapters.

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  Deleuze and Sex

  • Frida Beckman(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • EUP

    (Publisher)

  Freud has a range of sometimes contradictory theories concern-ing childhood sexuality. But if his work cannot fairly be reduced to a monolithic story of child sexuality, Little Hans is both a touchstone for several of Freud’s other papers and foundational to one of his most famous theories, the Oedipus complex. Freud’s definitive account of the myth of Oedipus appears in The Interpretation of Dreams , but in Little Hans the Oedipal story about repression became a story about normal sexual development in children rather than the experience of particular 118 Deleuze and Sex children, premised on the developmental redundancy of what Freud elsewhere calls the polymorphous perversity of childhood (Freud 1962: 87, 135–45). Toward the beginning of The History of Sexuality , Foucault argues that what we now understand as sexuality depends on an image of ‘Victorian’ childhood: Everyone knew, for example, that children had no sex, which is why they were forbidden to talk about it, why one closed one’s eyes and stopped one’s ears whenever they came to show evidence to the contrary, and why a general and studied silence was imposed [on the subject]. (Foucault 1984: 4) For Foucault, this image indexes a longer history tracing the emergence of modern ‘biopolitics’. A shift away from thinking and talking about sex as a form of pleasure since the seventeenth century is contiguous and coterminous in this account with new functions for sex as a regula-tory social norm (Foucault 1984: 3). This now well-known argument is given material life in Little Hans . What Foucault calls the ‘incitement to discourse’ (Foucault 1984: 17–35), the imperative to speak about sex which defines sexuality as the named-as-hidden core of the modern subject, is exemplified in the relations between Hans and his analysts. And the diagnosis of an Oedipal complex centring on the study of Little Hans exemplifies what Foucault calls the ‘repressive hypothesis’ manifest in this shift (Foucault 1984: 3–13).

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  Anatomy Of Madness Vol 1

  • W F Bynum, Michael Shepherd, Roy Porter(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is interesting at this stage to recall Nagel’s ground rules whereby psychoanalytic procedures and practices might be scientifically analysed and assessed. Nagel argued that at least some of the theoretical notions should be tied down to fairly definite and unambiguously stated observable material by way of rules of procedure variously called ‘correspondence rules’ and ‘co-ordinating definitions’. Can conclusions be deduced from the theory prior to knowing just what consequences the theory must have if it is to be in agreement with assumed matters of fact? In The Case Of Little Hans, the father expounded theoretical explanations to the boy who occasionally agreed and occasionally disagreed. Agreement was invariably seized upon as evidence of the difficulty the boy was having in facing up to the truth. In classical analysis the analyst is meant to be passive, but Nagel points out:

  ‘that in the nature of the case the full extent of the analyst’s intervention is not a matter that is open to public scrutiny so that by and large one has only his testimony as to what transpires in the consulting room. … No matter how firmly we may resolve to make explicit our biases no human being is aware of all of them and that objectivity in science is achieved through the criticism of publicly accessible material by a community of independent inquirers.’17

  The gradual indoctrination of the patient into the theoretical framework of psychoanalytic theory, persuasively described by Wolpe and Rachman in their analysis of The Case Of Little Hans, remains an obstacle to the objective assessment of the theory some eighty years on. However, there are those who insist that the true worth of the theory lies not in its objective truth so much as the fact that it provides a coherent and intelligible picture of intrapsychic life and personal relationships. Coherence there may be in the analysis of the phobia in the Little Hans case, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this coherence is achieved by the ingenuity with which the reported data are made to dovetail with a preconceived psychoanalytical theoretical formulation.

  What of the outcome in this case? When Freud met Hans some fourteen years later, the nineteen-year-old youth had no recollection at all of his childhood fear of horses nor of the analysis. He had negotiated puberty without trouble and survived too the break-up and divorce of his parents, each of whom had remarried. As a result, Hans lived alone and regretted that the break-up of his family had separated him from the younger sister of whom he was so fond.

  The third of Freud’s six major case reports concerns an eighteen-year-old girl, known as ‘Dora’, who entered treatment with Freud in 1900. Her treatment was in fact short-lived – it lasted three months in all. Dora is afflicted with a few classic symptoms of ‘petite hysterie’ – a nervous cough, periodic loss of voice, possibly migraine, together with depression and unsociability. Her parents have a close relationship with Mr and Mrs K. with whom they often spend their vacations. Dora is extremely fond of their two small children. Dora’s father is frequently ill with chest infections and is nursed by Mrs K., much to Dora’s annoyance. Mr K., on the other hand, overwhelms Dora with presents and flowers and Dora indignantly reveals to her mother that Mr K. has been making propositions to her, which her father refuses to believe. Mr K. for his part denies the allegations and attributes them to Dora’s over-heated imagination.

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  Freud

  A Modern Reader

  • Rosine Jozef Perelberg(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  I would suggest that the interplay of masculine and feminine identifications in relation to the primal scene is a thread which permeates Freud’scase studies from Dora, to Little Hans, the Rat Man, Schreber, the Wolf Man, and ‘Psychogenesis of a Case of Sexuality in a Woman’ (all of which are discussed in this book). At the time he wrote about Little Hans, Freud regarded the prevalence of irrational anxiety in neurotic patients as due to a transformation of repressed libido into anxiety. Once the libido was transformed by repression into anxiety, it could not be re-transformed. Freud suggests that Hans’s original outbreak of anxiety was not organized around a phobia. The phobia is a secondary defence against the anxiety hysteria, achieved by organizing the anxiety around a phobic object. It restricted Hans’s mobility and his psychic exploration of the world of sexuality represented by the horses and wagons in the street, but kept him in the house near his mother. This paper is an account of the development of a phobia. It is also an account of its alleviation by means of psychoanalytic intervention. Once his wish to supplant his father and have sexual possession of his mother is interpreted to Hans, there is an alleviation of the symptoms. Narcissism Narcissism marks a transition in Freud’sthinking, originating a set of conflicts in Freud’stheory that paved the way for the structural model of the mind. As Perelberg indicates in Chapter 4, ‘On Narcissism’radically changed the concept of the ego. From then on, the ego was no longer just a place for mastering the drives, but became an ‘object’, an image, a vestige of past identifications. The ego is no longer seen as independent of any relationship, but is rather the result of the internalization of relationships (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1985).

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  Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire

  • Hans Eysenck(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  tussis nervosa, defloration in migraine, orgasm in an hysterical loss of consciousness, birth pangs in appendicitis, pregnancy wishes in hysterical vomiting, pregnancy fears in anorexia, an accouchement in a suicide leap, castration fears in an obsessive preoccupation with hat tipping, masturbation in the practice of squeezing blackheads, the anal theory of birth in an hysterical constipation, parturition in a falling cart-horse, nocturnal emissions in bedwetting, unwed motherhood in a limp, guilt over the practice of seducing pubescent girls in the compulsion to sterilize banknotes before passing them on, etc.

  A science cannot be based on subjective interpretations, and the Freudian account of childhood development, with its suggested basis for the development of neurotic symptoms, is quite unacceptable, and can be contradicted by solid facts. This conclusion will be strengthened by an examination of The Case Of Little Hans, the corner-stone of Freudian theorizing, and the analysis which gave rise to childhood psychoanalysis.

  Before turning to little Hans and his neurotic illness, it may be interesting to contrast Freud’s accounts of two four-year-old children – little Hans, who was almost five, and little Herbert, some months younger. Herbert is described as a specimen of enlightened child-rearing, ‘a splendid boy … whose intelligent parents abstained from forcibly suppressing one side of the child’s development’. Apparently little Herbert shows ‘the liveliest interest in that part of his body which he calls his wee-wee maker’ because ‘since he has never been frightened or oppressed with a sense of guilt he gives expression quite ingenuously to what he thinks’. Thus, according to Freud, little Herbert, brought up by psychoanalytically oriented parents, is likely to become one of the non-neurotic personalities of our time.

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  Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Babies, Children, and Adolescents

  Further Notes on the Child

  • Stephanie Farrelly Quinn, Carol Owens, Stephanie Farrelly Quinn, Carol Owens(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Introduction Further notes on the child ...

  Carol Owens and Stephanie Farrelly Quinn

  What in sum, is Little Hans? It is the babbling of a five year old child between January 1st and May 2nd, 1908. This is what Little Hans is for the reader who is not prepared. If he is prepared, and it is not hard to be, he knows that these stories have some interest. Why are they interesting? They are interesting, because it is suggested, at least in principle, that there is a relation between this babbling and something that is completely consistent, namely a phobia, with all of the troubles that it brings to the life of a young subject , all of the worry it arouses in his entourage, all of the interest it provokes in Professor Freud.

  (Lacan, 5th June 1957, our emphasis)

  In the long trajectory of his teaching Lacan did not say or write very much exclusively about psychoanalytic practice with children, with “young subjects”. What he did say and write about it—even though we should admit that this took place mainly in the margins of his teaching—is regarded however as being of fundamental clinical significance and pertinence by Lacanian psychoanalysts, whether working with children or older subjects in analytic treatments. For the most part, the remarks which he made emerged at key points and moments, in the theorising, and critique, of psychoanalytic concepts and themes which he chose to examine in his seminar spanning some thirty years, and in his Écrits and other papers. For instance, in his “Presentation on Psychic Causality” (Lacan, 1946) he elaborates on his “Mirror Stage” theory as the means by which he was able to outline the psychological genesis of psychical causality insofar as it is grounded in the operation of identification of the individual with his or her semblables (Lacan, 1946, p. 154). Be that as it may, the widely referenced “Mirror Stage” article is a really good example of a piece of Lacan’s work which has implications for the psychoanalytic conceptualisation of “the child” even as it is interrogates the notion of ego development, and mobilises the essential Lacanian discovery of the ego in its function as misrecognition (Lacan, 1949, p. 76; and see Fortune, Chapter Sixteen in this volume). In fact, there is rich material of clinical relevance for the psychoanalyst working with children from his very early work on the “Family Complexes” (Lacan, 1938), as well as from nearly every one of the early seminars, taking into account that it is during the 1950s, especially in those places where he charts the paternal function and metaphor, the graphs of desire, and attendant commentaries on need and demand, and on “clinical structure”, that we find the remarks about the young subject and the child more frequently referenced than in the later seminars (especially after Seminar X

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  Historiography and Causation in Psychoanalysis

  • Edwin R. Wallace, IV(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Then he took a big borer and stuck it into my stomach.... The plumber came; and first he took away my behind with a pair of pincers, and then gave me another, and then the same with my widdler" (Freud, 1909b, pp. 65, 98; Freud's italics). In regard to Little Hans' speculations about where babies come from consider the following: Hannah [his baby sister, whose birth precipitated his neurosis] travelled with us to Gmunden in a box like that [his mother would have been pregnant with her then]. Whenever we travelled to Gmunden she travelled with us in the box. You don't believe me again? Really, Daddy. Do believe me. We got a big box and it was full of babies (ibid, p. 69). Hanna just came. Frau Kraus [the midwife] put her in the bed. She couldn't walk, of course. But the stork carried her in his beak. . . . The stork came up the stairs to a landing. . . and he had the right key and unlocked the door and put Hanna in your [his father's] bed, and Mummy was asleep—no, the stork put her in her bed' (ibid, p. 71, Freud's italics). Do you know how the stork opens the box? He takes his beak—the box has got a key too—he takes his beak, lifts up one (i.e., one-half of the beak) and unlocks it like this (ibid, p. 78). The lock-key-box symbolism virtually explains itself from the context, with little need to invoke psychic unity or universal symbolism. Nevertheless, this case report also makes evident the role of theory. Without a prior appreciation of psychoanalytic developmental psychology and psychodynamics, Hans' father would not have grasped the full significance of the defensive aspects of Hans' behavior and the nature of the dangers he feared. Since in the Little Hans case Freud had access, through the father, to events which would ordinarily (in the analysis of adult neurotics) have to be reconstructed, this treatment reflects a somewhat different species of history-writing—closer to contemporary chronicle than to historiography—than that in the Rat Man

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