Freud – Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy – Little Hans

Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy teeny-weeny Hans Chronological compend of Events 1903 Hans born. (April) 1906 3 to 3 ? initiatory reports. 3 ? to 3 ? First visit to Gmunden. (Summer) 3 ? Castration terror. 3 ? Hanna born. (October) 1907 3 ? First dream. 4 Removal to new flat. 4 ? to 4 ? Second visit to Gmunden. Episode of sulfurous horse. (Summer) 1908 4 ? Episode of glitter horse. Outbreak of phobic disorder. (January) 5 End of analysis. (May) Background Little Hans (Herbert Graf) was born in April 1903 to Olga Graf ( incur) and Max Graf ( set close to).He under overlyk four months of interference, which was conducted by Hans overprotect himself, and supervised by Freud, who to a faultk slightly of a backseat. Freud wanted to explore what factors led to the phobia and what factors led to its remission. He believed baberen face un sure wound up conflicts just as adults do, and their future registration depends on how well the conflicts are solved. It wa s the firstborn ever psychoanalytic intercession on a infant. Freud believed that the sexual impulses in a tyke would be fresh and naive, unlike when conducting the analysis on an adult, where the impulses construct to be dig out.Freud hypothesised that the analysis would correspond with his preliminary work in the iii Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Overview First observations were larnn at triplet course of papers, where Hans spirit of enquiry towards widdlers became apparent with his initial observation that the front end or absence of a widdler differentiated between inanimate and animate quarrys p. 9. He likewise assumed that entirely animate objects were like himself and possessed this strategic bodily reed organ gum olibanum allowing him to hail at a live abstract k directledge A dog and horse wee widdlers a table and chair havent. He was not deterred from this notion condescension noting the lack of a widdler on his sis Hanna p. 11. Hans had begu n to practise the comm hotshotst and approximately linguistic rule form of auto- titillating sexual activity Giving himself diversion by touching his member. The castration heterogeneous was first planted in to Hans head at three and a half years when his niggle told him the doctor would sire and chop his widdler off if he didnt stop playing with it. p. 7-8. At the present period he was unfased, and suggested he could wee out of his bottom.His nonpluss threat made Hans believe it was possible to lose your genital organs, which he would later on(prenominal) subconsciously believe would happen for repressing oedipal likings. This concern for the sledding of his widdler was ab initio dismissed from his thoughts solely made its effects apparent at a later period. Taking pleasure in his knowledge sexual organ soon false in to scopophelia, in active and passive forms with his main(prenominal) fantasies and dreams being adopted around widdlers, widdling and gazeing tha t the girls in Gmunden would help him widdle p. 19. At get a gigantic with 3 ? e asked his induce Daddy, have you got a widdlers too? When he asked his mformer(a) if she had a widdler, she replied with why of course. He in any case repeatedly expressed the desire to chance upon his mother and beats widdlers in order to disengage comparison. Hans had restraind that larger animals had correspondingly larger widdlers and formulated the hypothesis that this was the graphic symbol with his parents. For example his mother he thought must have a widdlers like a horse. This reflection could be cons genuine that a childs wish to be bigger had been concentrate on his genitals.The sexual aim in which he pursued his girl playmates had prepare its elan into object love in the usual personal manner from the care he had received as an infant. Its suggested that this sudden erotic urge originated from the pleasure derived from the cutaneous (skin) contact of sleeping next to his moth er (Hans would crawl into bed most mornings). This caused sexual arousal or mirth of the instinct(predicate) of concentration Moll (1898). Cf &SE, 7, 169 n. 2. . This facilitated his increased affaire in other girls (wanting to sleep with Mariedl Etc. and ultimately wanting to see their widdlers. Little Hans showed affection towards both genders of children indiscriminately and once described Fritzl as the girl he was fondest of p. 16. This contributed to Freuds idea of object-choice and homosexuality in children suggesting that most children have homosexual tendencies as they are precisely acquainted with one kind of genital organ. Freud intimates that because tiny Hans had a widdler, and gave so much enormousness to it, he chose to have this familiar feature as his sexual object.It is as well serious to note that in his future organic evolution he present an energetic masculinity with traits of polygamy he knew how to vary his behaviour, too, with his varying feminine objectsaudaciously aggressive in one case, languishing and bashful in another. His affection had locomote from his mother on to other objects of love, but at a beat when there was a scarcity of these it returned to her. Hans demonstrates elements of the sexual relations of a child to his parents discussed in Interpretation of Dreams 1900a, in Section D (? ) of Chapter V amount Ed. , 4, 248 ff. and in Three Essays 1905d, Standard Ed. 7, 222 ff. with regard to being a little Oedipus who who wanted to have his compensation back out of the way, to get dislodge of him, so that he might be alone with his beautiful mother and sleep with her. This wish had originated during his summer holidays at Gmunden and had developed with the alternating presence and absence of his arrest (due to work commitments). Hans identified that his fathers absenteeism gave him the probability of increased amour with his mother which he longed for. This desire for his father to go past and so late r developed into a desire for him to permanently go outdoor(a) to die.This caused great conflict inwardly Hans as it contradicted the deep love he also matt-up towards his father. For example hitting his father accordingly directly kissing the place he had hit p. 42. Freud goes on to description that the emotional life of man is made up of pairs of contraries such(prenominal) as these. And that they commonly go on supressing apiece other until one of them succeeds in guardianship the other al together out of site. Children offer the exception to this in that they plunder exist peaceably side-by-side for roughly time. Baby Hanna and the Stalk The most important influence upon the course of Hans psychosexual evelopment. Hans wathed how Hanna was cared for and this stimulated trace memories of his own wee experiences of pleasure. His fever a few days after Hannas nascence was an indication of how little he liked the addition to the family p. 11. Although affection came later his first thoughts were hostility and affright that yet much brothers and sisters might arrive further eroding the time and affection mother would devote to him. Freud bring ups that it is promiscuous indoors Hans unconscious he treated his sister and father in the same way wanting them permanently out of the way.Interestingly Hans did not comrade the same guilt towards his sisters death wish as that of his father. He subconsciously wanted mummy to drop Hanna in the bath so she would be gone, which consequently caused Hans great fretting when having a bath himself, fearing it would happen to him as a punishment for thinking such affairs. Again, this wish would mean he could have his mummy all to himself. This hostility is represented by a fear of the bath p. 66. The use of a Stork to explain the origin of Hanna was in conflict with the childish sexual theories he had begun to apply to the material in front of him.There is a clear progression from his initial acceptanc e of his fathers history he declared with conviction The storks coming to-day. to a ripening sentiency that Everything he says shows that he connects what is strange in the situation with the arrival of the stork. He meets everything he sees with a very suspicious and intent look, and there raise be no question that his first doubts about the stork have taken root. p. 10 Causes of fretting and the beginning of the phobia Little Hans suffered an apprehension-dream shortly before the light of the phobia, in which mummy had gone and he had no mummy to draw with.This, combined with his separation from his mother at the time of Hannas fend for p. 96 led to a sudden surge of wanting mummy. Initially he would show signs of distress when away from her but it soon became evident that he was withal afraid even when his mother went with him. Freud suggested Little Hans had now concentrated his libido on her. His want to be with her constantly now changed into anxiety producing the phobia. He was initially scared of a big white horse biting him in the street, and his father worried this was connected to the fear of big widdlers, which he had once taken great pleasure in examining.His fear was so strong that he struggled to leave the house, even more than so without his mother. Whereas Little Hans once loved the fact that big animals had big widdlers, he now subdue it and was scared. This was thought to be due to him being so dissatisfy with his own. Anxiety was caused by mixing his former pleasure of big widdlers with his current un-pleasure of them. Little Hans admitted to placing his hands on his widdler every night which resulted in around kind of sexual pleasure or satisfaction ( almostthing which Freud later heroic as a normal form of auto-erotic sexual activity).Yet at this archean stage of the illness when his anxiety was heightened he expressed a fear that the horse get out come into the room p. 24. His father worried that this coitus interrupt us was not helping the phobia. Freud suggested that it was his affection for his mother that he was trying to transpose with his fear of horses p. 28. His libido was attached to seeing his mothers widdler and masturbation was adult him gratification. Attempts were made to stop this act, and daddy told Hans that mummy did in fact not have a widdlers p. 31, which calmed the phobia for a short while.Freud believed that accepting women do not have widdlers risked destroying Hans self-confidence and heightened the castration complex, so he resisted the information. subsequently a short time an episode of illness caused the phobia to return. Freud finding similarity between the mental structure of these phobias and that of hysteria termed this Anxiety-hysteria concluding that such hysterias are the most common of all psychoneurotic disorders and goes on to state they are par excellence in the neuroses of childhood. Little Hans outbreak of anxiety-hysteria was by no means as sudden as it first appeared.The anxiety dream he had where his mother had gone away and he was go forth with no-one to coax with p. 26 was proceeded by twain examples of attempts to seduce her p. 19 23. Hans dreamt of exchanging endearments and sleeping with her but all of the pleasure was transferred into anxiety causation a punishment and repression. The throttle for suddenly turning this sexual excitement into anxiety is speculated upon by Freud suggesting that mothers rejection of his advances could be one possibility. His fear of horses was traced back to an impression he had received at Gmunden p. 9 when his father warned him Dont put your riff to the horse if you do, itll bite you. The words, dont put your finger to, which Hans used in reporting this process of monition, resembled the form of words in which the warning against masturbation had been framed. Hans attempted to communicate his feeling towards his mother, in what was windlessness a distorted form, with the phant asy of the two giraffes. Little Hans story of the big giraffe and the crumpled giraffe was interpreted by his father and Freud. His father was thus the big giraffe and mummy was the crumpled giraffe.Subconsciously, little Hans wanted to take self-discipline of mummy, by taking her away from daddy. Hans loved getting in to bed with mummy in the morning, it gave him pleasure, but the big giraffe duty out was his father dislike of him getting in. Immediately after the giraffe hallucination Hans disclosed two others forcing his way into a nix home at Schonbrunn, and the other of his smashing a railway-carriage window on the Stadtbahn p. 40-41. In each case the punishable nature of the action was emphasized, and in each his father appeared as an accomplice. This again links to the oedipal slipistic of taking possession of his mother.This combined with his burgeoning childish sexual theories that taking possession would involve some form of consummation which gave rise to the elusi ve thought of something violent and forbidden which the dreams allude to. Freud states that the dreams were indeed symbolic phantasies of intercourse and that his father plays accomplice within the dreams as Hans has very astutely deduced that I should like, he seems to have been saying to his father, to be doing something with my mother, something forbidden I do not last what it is, but I do know that you are doing it too. The giraffe fantasy resulted in Freud and father deciding it was the right time to inform Hans he was afraid of his father because he himself nourished jealous and hostile wishes against him and thus partly interpreted his fear of horses for him the horse must be his father whom he had costly internal reasons for fearing. p. 42 Subconsciously he was extremely trepid that his father would find out, as he feared if he did he would bowdlerize him. When an internal situation such as this one cannot be processed, it blends pathological, and a compromise-format ion needs to happen, which becomes apparent at the very end of the analysis.Enlightening Hans on this keep polish up had cleared away his most powerful resistance against allowing his unconscious thoughts to be made conscious for his father was himself acting as his physician. As a result Hans became more aware/willing/confident to describe the details of his phobia He was not only afraid of horses biting himhe was soon silent upon that pointbut also of carts, of furniture-vans, and of sightes (their common eccentric being, as presently became clear, that they were all heavily loaded), of horses that started moving, of horses that looked big and heavy, and of horses that drove quickly.The content of these specifications was explained by Hans himself he was afraid of horses falling down, and consequently incorporated in his phobia everything that seemed likely to facilitate their falling down. p. 46-7. Hans described going for a walk with his mother and witnessing a bus-horse fall down and kick bump into with his feet p. 49. He was terrified thinking the horse was dead and that all horses will fall down. He then associated this with the wish for his father to go away and wanted him to fall down in the same way and be dead. When confronted with this notion Hans did not dispute it and later went on to play a game of biting his father symbolically accepting the theory that he had identified his father with the horse he was afraid of. p. 52. Upon questioning Hans father uncovered an impression which lay concealed behind that of the falling bus horse of an essence that occurred during their summer at Gmunden. While they were playing horses Fritzl had hit his foot against a stone and fallen down. p. 58.Seeing the bus horse fall while walking with his mother had reminded him of this although Hans initially denied this p. 82. Freud commented that It is especially interesting, tho, to observe the way in which the transformation of Hanss libido into anxiety was projected on to the principal object of his phobia, on to horses. Hans regarded Fritzl as a substitute for his father, particularly as Fritzl competed with Hans for the attention and affection of the girl playmates at Gmunden in a similar way to the manner in which Hans competed with his father for his beloved mothers affection.Freud also states that When repression had set in and brought a revulsion of feeling along with it, horses, which had till then been associated with so much pleasure, were necessarily turned into objects of fear. The Lumf Complex Hans became unexpectedly preoccupied with lumf masking disgust at anything that reminded him of evacuating his bowels p. 55. Hans had been in the habit of insisting upon accompanying his mother to the W. C. p. 63. His friend Berta filled his mothers place, until the fact became known and he was forbidden to do so p. 1. His father speculated that there was a link between the symbolisation of a loaded horse cart short through som e gates (which Hans had observed in the Customs House opposite their home) and the fugacious of faeces out of the body p 66-68. Hans further clarified the symbolism of lumf with an special phantasy of the plumber Daddy, I thought something I was in the bath, and then the plumber came and unscrewed it. Then he took a big borer and stuck it into my stomach. p. 65. Freud interpreted this as With your big fellow member you bored me (i. . gave birth to me) and put me in my mothers womb. His fantasy regarding the plumber unscrewing the bath and then struck him in the stomach with a big borer was further interpreted later on in the analysis. He was remoulding a fantasy of procreation, distorted by anxiety. The big bath was his mothers womb and the borer was his fathers penis expectant a connection to being born. We must also knock over Hans earlier confession that he wished that his mother might drop the child while she was being addicted her bath, so that she should die p. 72.His own anxiety attached to bathing was a fear of retribution for this shabbiness wish and of being punished by the same thing happening to him. Hans locomote on to draw the natural conclusion that little Hanna was a lumf herself and that all babies were lumfs and were born like lumfs. We can thus deduce that all furniture-vans, drays and buses were only stork-box carts, and were because symbolic representations of pregnancy and that when a horse fell down it can not only be seen as his dying father but also his mother in childbirth a foreign desire and fear.As discussed during the stork analysis Hans had noticed his mothers pregnancy and had pieced the facts of the case together without telling anyone. Which was demonstrated by his sceptical attitude towards the stork explanation pass awayn by his father and his description of Hanna joining them at Gmunden a year before her actual birth. Hans justified this phantasy, and in fact deliberately embellished it as an act of revenge up on his father. against whom he harboured a grudge for having misled him with the stork fable. Freud eloquently summarises Hans subconscious feeling on the matter If you really thought I was as stupid s all that, and expected me to believe that the stork brought Hanna, then in return I expect you to, accept my inventions as the truth. Hans continued to examine revenge within the phantasy of teasing and beating horses p. 79. This phantasy, again, had two constituents. first of all to reinforce his pleasure at the teasing he had submitted his father with the remembrance of Hanna at Gmunden and secondly, it reproduced the obscure sadistic desires directed towards his mother. Hans even confessed consciously to a desire to beat his mother p. 81.Hans discloses further phantasies which seem to confirm his growing confidence to communicate his conscious wish to get rid of his father and that the reason he wished it was that his father interfered with his own intimacy with his mother. As Freud states this understandably shows Hans progressive development from timid hinting to fully conscious, undistorted perspicuity. Overcoming his fears Concluding phantasies Freud describes the first of these as a triumphant, wishful phantasy, and with it he overcame his fear of castration in which the plumber gives Hans a new and, as his father guessed, a bigger widdler p. 98.His second phantasy confessed to the wish to be married to his mother and to have many children by her p. 96-97. Significantly this phantasy also provided an acceptable to Hans event to the unacceptable conflict within him caused by his desire to kill his father. rather he promoted him to marry Hans grandmother. Thus resolving the alternating emotions of love and nauseate towards his father and the evil thoughts hed harboured towards him. Hans had made up for the loss (reduced care and attention received from his mother) he experienced as a result of the birth of his sister by imagining he had children o f his own. And so long as they were at Gmunden he could really play with his children and therefore set up an acceptable to him outlet for his affections. The families subsequent return to Vienna refocused Hans attention on his mother resulting in him gaining satisfaction by a masturbatory stimulation of his genitals. His desire to have children was twofold He necessitateed Hanna to be born like expiration a lumf and therefore identified with his own feelings of pleasure in passing stool. Secondly the compensatory pleasure of passing his affection onto them. The conflict within Hans arose by his inability to cognise his fathers ole in Hannas (and therefore his own) birth. Hans could understand that he and Hanna were his mothers children after all he now knew she had bought them into the world. But what role had his father played and what gave him the right to say they were his? As discussed Hans considered his fathers presence detrimental to his kinship with his mother for exam ple by preventing her from sleeping with him. This revelation further built Hans hostility towards his father which was compounded by stork lie which Hans perceived to be a conscious decision by his father to keep Hans from the intimacy he was thirsting for. This, Hans concluded, was therefore putting him at a disadvantage on two fronts. Despite hating his rival he was the same father whom he had always loved and was bound to go on loving, who had been his model, had been his first playmate, and had looked after him from his earliest infancy thus giving rise to his first conflict. Freud therefore states that the hostile complex against his father screened the lustful one about his mother. Summary Conclusions Witnessing the horse falling down carried no traumatic force.It acquired deduction due do Hans former interest in them and the earlier event in Gmunden which ace to the association of horses from Fritzl to his father. This was then compounded by the redundant association of the horse falling with his mother in childbirth. Freud describes this return of the repressed as returning in such a manner that the the infective material was remodelled and transposed on to the horse-complex, while the accompanying affects were uniformly turned into anxiety. Hans phobia was also further distorted by the warning he had been given about masturbation and its link to the hostility he felt towards his father. Hans was later affected by a great wave of repression giving up masturbation and turning away in disgust at everything that reminded him of excrement and of the pleasure he had previously derived from observing other multitude performing their natural functions. This repression, considered natural by Freud Three Essays 1905d, Standard Ed. , was not notwithstanding the precipitating cause of the illness. The two key conditions leading to Hans phobia were tendencies within Hans that had already been suppressed and had therefore never been able to find abandone d expression i) Hostile and Jealous feelings towards his father ii) Sadistic impulses (premonitions of copulation) towards his mother. These repressed ideas forced their way into Hans consciousness as the (distorted) content of the phobia. As Freud describe this was besides a paltry success as the forces of repression made use of the opportunity to extend their dominion over components other than those that had rebelled. The purpose of the phobia was therefore to restrict his movement Keeping him closer to his mothers affections. Hans had always taken pleasure in movement Im a young horse, he had utter as he jumped about p. 58. This pleasure in movement had however included the instinctive impulse to copulate with his mother and resulted in Hans causing his symbol of movement (the horse) to develop into a conscious anxiety. Alfred Adler suggested that anxiety arrises from the quelling of an aggressive instinct Adler, Der Aggressionstrieb im Leben und in der Neurose (1908).Howeve r Freud disagrees with this notion and goes on to state that this onset is an indispensable attribute of all instincts. Or to simplify each instinct has its own power of becoming aggressive. Frued identifies the two instincts which became repressed in Hans as familiar components of the sexual libido. Freud seemed to hold Hans in high regard describing him as well formed physically, and was a cheerful, amiable, active-minded young fellow who might give pleasure to more people than his own father. He went on to observe that it is by no means such a rare thing to find object-choice and feelings of love in boys at a similarly previous(predicate) age. Signigficantly he also goes on to speculate that sexual precocity is a correlate, which is seldom absent, of intellectual precocity, and that it is therefore to be met with in gifted children more often than might be expected. This is demonstrated by Hans ability to blood-related abstract reasoning particularly towards his childish sexual theories relating to the origin of his sister Hanna.Freud continues to say that Hans is not the only child who has been overtaken by a phobia at some time or other in his childhood. In fact such phobias can be extraordinarily frequent. Typically Their phobias are shouted down in the nursery because they are inaccessible to treatment and are decidedly inconvenient. In the course of months or years they diminish, and the child seems to recover but no one can tell what psychological changes are necessitated by such a recovery, or what alterations in character are involved in it. He therefore concludes that Hans illness may not have been any more serious than that of many other children who are not branded as degenerates. As discussed in previous papers For example last section of the third of Freuds Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality(1905d), Standard Ed. , 7, 225. psycho-analytic analysis of adult neurotics regularly identifies infantile anxiety as the point of departur e. Freud goes on to discus wider societal issues stating that we concentrate too much upon symptoms and concern ourselves too little with their causes. An issue arguable still as relevant today as it as at the time of Freuds writing. Freuds concern was that In bringing up children we aim only at being left in peace and having no difficulties, in short, at training up a model child, and we pay very little attention to whether such a course of development is for the childs good as well. It can therefore be argued that the phobia was in fact an advantage for Hans as it directed his parents to unavoidable difficulties in overcoming the naive instinctual components of the mind. With his father assistance Hans now longer carries the repressed complexes other children still have to bear. It is also fair to state (as Freud does) that such complexes (as the origins of babies) are not only repressed by children but dreaded by their parents. Freud also looked to counter potential criticism that by bringing Hans wicked instincts into his conscious he might act upon then. For example acting out his evil wishes against his father?In his Postscript (1922) Freud scornfully comments that some readers of the case study had foretold a most evil future for little Hans who had been a victim of psychoanalysis thus robbing him of his innocence. He triumphantly reports that none of these predictions had come true and that the analysis actually facilitated Hans recovery. It had in fact helped prepare him for the emotional turbulency of his parents separation in subsequent years. A further point to consider from the postscript is teenage Hans apparent infant amnesia towards the challenges of his early years.He also argues in favour of full disclosure by telling him about the vagina and copulation allowing him to put an end to his stream of questions without loosing love for his mother or his own childish nature. In his conclusion Freud discusses a number of principles common to innovational psychotherapy. For example A number of individuals are constantly passing from the course of action of healthy people into that of neurotic patients, while a far smaller number also make the journey in the opposite direction. A childs upbringing can exercise a powerful influence for good or for evil upon the disposition they subsequently exhibit. The origin of pathogenic complexes deserves to be regarded by educators as an invaluable guide in their conduct towards children. And subsequently At what cost has the suppression of inconvenient instincts been achieved? He also passes comment on the psychoanalytic process itself. Specifically relating to this analysis he states Previously, his father the therapist had been able to tell him Hans in advance what was coming, while Hans had merely followed his lead and come trotting after but now it was Hans who was forging ahead, so rapidly and steadily that his father the therapist found it difficult to keep up with him. T his alludes to the large challenge the therapist faces in containing and interpreting the information and emotions the patient transfers onto them. In the case of Hans this is compounded by the conflict produced within the father-son/therapist-patient diad. Something Freud refers to when discussing the considerable restriction in bringing Hans hostility towards his father into the little boys conscious. This is summarised beautifully by Freud in the following paragraph The physician is a step in front of him in knowledge and the patient follows along his own road, until the two meet at the appointed goal. Beginners in psycho-analysis are apt to cod these two events, and to suppose that the moment at which one of the patients unconscious complexes has become known to them is also the moment at which the patient himself recognises it. They are expecting too much when they think that they will cure the patient by inform him of this piece of knowledge for he can do no more with the information than make use of it to help himself in discovering the unconscious complex where it is anchored in his unconscious.