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

The first reports about Hans date to the time when he wasn’t yet three years old. At that time, he demonstrated—in various ways of talking and asking—a particularly vivid interest in that part of the body that he was used to calling his weewee-maker. So he asked his mother one day: “Mama, do you have a weewee-maker?” [ . . . ]

Meanwhile, his interest in the weewee-maker was not purely theoretical; as one might suppose he was also tempted to touch his penis. At the age of 3½ He is discovered by his mother with his hand on his penis. She threatens: “If you do that, I will call Dr. A., and he will cut off your weewee-maker. And what will you use then to make weewee?” [ . . . ]

Hans’s recent enlightenment that women really did not have a weewee-maker could only have a destabilizing effect on his self-confidence and awakened the castration complex. Hence, he resisted it, and therefore the information did not have a therapeutic effect: There really were living beings that did not have a weewee-maker? In that case, it was no longer so unbelievable that one could take away his own weewee-maker and thus transform him into a woman.¹ [ . . . ]

Medical History and Analysis

One day in the street, Hans becomes sick with anxiety. [ . . . ]

At the highest intensity of his state of anxiety during the first days [of his experiencing it] he articulates his dread: “The horse will come into the room,” which made it much easier for me to understand his fear.

Until now the location of “phobias” within the system of neuroses had been undetermined. What appears certain is that one ought to regard phobias only as syndromes that in fact belong to different neuroses, and one does not need to grant them the significance of being their own particular disease processes. For phobias like that of our little patient, which are the most prevalent, the name “anxiety hysteria” is not impractical; I proposed it to Dr. W. Stekel, when he was undertaking the description of states of nervous anxiety,² and I hope that it will gain currency. [ . . . ]

Anxiety hysterias are the most frequent of the psychoneurotic illnesses; in particular, they are the ones that manifest first in life; they are virtually the neuroses of childhood. When a mother reports that her child is “nervous,” one can expect in nine out of ten cases that the child has some kind of fear or has several anxieties at the same time. [ . . . ]

We already heard about the child’s behavior during the initial period of anxiety and about the initial content that he assigns to his anxiety: a horse will bite him. At this point, therapy intervenes for the first time. The parents point out that the anxiety is a consequence of the masturbation and instruct him in how to break the habit. I take care that the tenderness for the mother, which he wants to exchange for his fear of horses, is forcefully emphasized in front of him. Minor improvement after his first intervention is soon wiped out in a period of physical illness. The condition is unchanged. A short while later, Hans discovers that he derives his fear that a horse will bite him from the memory of an impression formed in Gmunden. Back then a departing father warned his child: “Don’t offer the finger to the horse, or it will bite you.” The verbal form in which his father expressed the warning, recalls the warning against masturbation [offering the finger]. The parents appear to be right that Hans is spooked by his masturbatory gratification. But the connection is a loose one and the horse seems to have assumed its role as the agent of terror rather accidentally.

I had proposed the hypothesis that a repressed wish could be that he absolutely wanted to see the mother’s weewee-maker. Since his behavior toward a newly hired maid concords with that wish, he receives his first enlightenment from the father: women do not a have weewee-makers. He reacts to this first helpful assistance by relating a phantasy that he saw how his mother touched her weewee-maker. This phantasy and a remark made in a conversation that his weewee-maker was attached to his body allow a first glimpse into the unconscious thought processes of the patient. He was truly under the influence of the lasting impression of the castration threat made by his mother a year and a half earlier, since the phantasy that his mother was doing the same thing, the routine return accusation made by children who stand accused, is supposed to serve as relief; it is a protection and defense phantasy. Meanwhile we have to tell ourselves that it was the parents who extracted from the pathogenic material active in Hans the theme of his preoccupation with the weewee-maker. He followed them in this [attempt] but at that time did not become active in his own analysis. No therapeutic success is observed. The analysis is far away from the horses, and the information that women do not have a weewee-maker has the potential to increase his worry about the preservation of his own weewee-maker.