The history of illness and recovery in a very young patient that will be recounted in the following pages is not, strictly speaking, the product of my own observation. 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; and I wish to express my profound gratitude to him for allowing me access to his notes for the purposes of this publication. The father’s contribution goes further than this, however: in my view, 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. Only by uniting in one person the authority of the father and that of the doctor, only because affectionate interests coincided with scientific ones, was it possible in this one case to apply a method that would normally have been quite unsuitable.
The particular value of observing this patient may be explained as follows. The physician who treats an adult suffering from neurosis by means of psychoanalysis – by painstakingly uncovering psychic formations layer by layer – eventually arrives at certain assumptions about infantile sexuality, in whose components he believes he has found the driving force behind all neurotic symptoms in later life. I have presented these assumptions in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (pub. 1905); I know that to anyone less familiar with such matters they appear as distasteful as they appear irrefutable to the psychoanalyst. But even the psychoanalyst may admit to the desire for more direct, more immediate proof of these fundamental principles. Is it really so impossible to gain direct evidence from the child in all the freshness of youth of those sexual stirrings and fantasies, which in the case of an older person we must excavate so assiduously from the earthworks thrown up to conceal them; particularly since we assert that they are common to the constitution of all human beings and occur in the neurotic individual only in a more pronounced or distorted form?
To this end I have for years encouraged my pupils and friends to collect observations on the sexual life of children, which is normally either skilfully overlooked or deliberately denied. Among the material which came into my hands as a result of this request, pride of place was soon taken by the continuing story of little Hans. 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. I reproduce here the father’s jottings on little Hans just as they were given to me, and I shall naturally refrain from any attempt to pervert and misrepresent the naivety and straightforwardness of the nursery, merely for the sake of convention.
The first information about Hans dates back to a time when he was not quite three years old. At that time he expressed in various remarks and questions a particularly lively interest in that part of his anatomy which he called his ‘widdler’. Thus he once asked his mother:
Hans: ‘Mummy, have you got a widdler too?’
Mummy: ‘Of course I have. Why?’
Hans: ‘I just wondered.’
At the same age he once went into a cowshed and saw a cow being milked, ‘Look, milk comes out of the cow’s widdler.’
These very first observations arouse the expectation that a great deal, if not most, of what little Hans shows us will prove typical of the sexual development of children. I have argued elsewhere1 that we should not be too horrified if we encounter in a female the fantasy of sucking on the male organ. This shocking impulse is harmless in origin, for it is derived from sucking at the mother’s breast; the cow’s udder performs a useful mediating function here, for it is mammary in nature, but in form and position a penis. Little Hans’s discovery confirms the last part of my theory. At the same time his interest in widdlers is not just theoretical: as we might surmise, it stimulates him to touch that organ as well. At the age of 31⁄2 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 need 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. There is much of importance that could be said about the significance of this element of child development. The ‘castration complex’ has left conspicuous traces in mythology (not just in Greek mythology, moreover); I have touched on the part it plays in a passage in Die Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] (2nd edition, p. 385; 7th edition, p. 456) and elsewhere.2 At about the same age (31⁄2), standing in front of the lion’s cage at Schönbrunn, he cries out with joyful excitement: ‘I saw the lion’s widdler.’ The importance of animals in myth and fairy-tale is due in no small measure to the openness with which they display their genitalia and their sexual functions to the curious young child. There is no doubt as to Hans’s sexual curiosity, but it also makes a research scientist of him, allows him to make real conceptual discoveries. At 33⁄4 he watches water being drained off from an engine at the station. ‘Look, the engine’s doing a widdle. But where’s its widdler?’ After a while he goes on thoughtfully: ‘Dogs and horses have widdlers; tables and chairs don’t.’ Thus he has discovered a crucial characteristic that allows him to distinguish animate from inanimate. Intellectual curiosity and sexual curiosity appear to be inextricably linked. Hans’s curiosity is directed towards his parents in particular.
Hans, aged 33⁄4: ‘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.’
We must bear in mind little Hans’s expectation; its significance will become apparent later on.
The great event in Hans’s life was the birth of his little sister Hanna when he was exactly 31⁄2 years old (April 1903–October 1906). His behaviour on this occasion was noted down at the time by his father:
When labour begins at 5 a.m. Hans’s bed is moved next door; he wakes up there at 7 a.m. and hears the groans of his mother in labour, whereupon he asks ‘Why is Mummy coughing?’ – After a pause – ‘I expect the stork is coming today.’
Over the last little while we have often told him, of course, that the stork will be bringing a baby girl or boy, and so he quite correctly associates the unfamiliar groaning with the arrival of the stork.
Later he is taken into the kitchen; in the hall he sees the doctor’s bag and asks ‘What’s that?’ to which we reply ‘A bag’. Quite convinced now, he says ‘The stork’s coming today.’ After the birth the midwife comes into the kitchen and Hans hears her give orders for a cup of tea; then he says ‘Oh I see, Mummy’s got a cough and so they’re making her tea.’ He is then called into the bedroom, but doesn’t look at his mummy, only at the bowls of bloody water still standing in the room, and pointing at the bloody bedpan he remarks, taken aback: ‘My widdler doesn’t make blood come out.’
Everything he says shows that he connects the unusual circumstances with the arrival of the stork. He is on tenterhooks, looks askance at everything, and there is no doubt that the first stirrings of doubt about the stork are gaining a foothold.
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.’3 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.4
Shortly after this Hans watches his week-old sister being given a bath. He remarks: ‘Goodness, her widdler is really tiny still; and adds, by way of consolation: ‘When she grows up it’s bound to get bigger’.5
At the same age, 33⁄4 years old, Hans relates a dream for the first time. ‘When I was asleep today I thought I was in Gmunden with Mariedl.’
Mariedl is the landlord’s 13-year-old daughter, who often played with him.
When Hans’s father tells his mother the dream in his presence Hans corrects him: ‘Not with Mariedl, on my own with Mariedl.’
Some background information:
Hans spent the summer of 1906 in Gmunden, where he used to spend the whole day in the company of the landlord’s children. When we left Gmunden we thought he would find it hard to say goodbye and go back to town. To our surprise this was not the case. He obviously enjoyed the change and for several weeks said very little about Gmunden. Only weeks later did animated memories quite frequently come to the surface of the time he had spent in Gmunden. For about the last four weeks he has been transforming these memories into fantasies. He fantasizes that he is playing with the children, Berta, Olga and Fritzl, talks to them as if they were there with him and is capable of amusing himself for hours in this fashion. Now that he has a sister and is obviously preoccupied with the problem of where babies come from, he calls Berta and Olga ‘his children’ and adds on one occasion, ‘My children, Berta and Olga, were brought by the stork too.’ It is now six months since we left Gmunden, and the dream is obviously to be understood as the expression of his yearning to go back again.
This is what his father has to say; I will anticipate myself by observing that with his last remark about the children the stork is supposed to have brought him, Hans consciously contradicts a feeling of doubt lurking inside him. Luckily his father noted down quite a number of things that acquire an unexpected value later on.
I draw a giraffe for Hans, who has recently quite often been to Schönbrunn. 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 (see the accompanying drawing), which at first he leaves short but then adds another line to it, remarking, ‘His widdler is longer than that.’
FIG. I
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.’
We already know that this formula makes it possible for him to maintain the validity of his discovery (cf. p. 5).
Every researcher runs the risk of getting something wrong now and again. It may be of some comfort to him if, like Hans in the next example, he is not alone in his mistake, but can look to linguistic usage to excuse himself.6 For in his picture book he sees a monkey and points to its upward-curling tail: ‘Look Daddy, there’s his widdler.’
In his fascination for widdlers he has thought up a very special game.
Off the hall are the WC and a dark storeroom for wood. For some time Hans has been going into the storeroom, saying: ‘I’m going to use my lavatory.’ One day I look in to see what he is doing in the dark storeroom. He is exposing himself and says, ‘I’m having a widdle.’ That is to say: he is ‘playing’ lavatories. It is clear that he is playing, not only because he is merely pretending to widdle, and not actually doing so, but also because he does not go to the lavatory, which would actually be a great deal easier, but prefers the wood store, which he refers to as ‘his lavatory’.
It would be unfair to Hans to pursue only the auto-erotic aspects of his sexual life. His father offers detailed observations concerning his relationships with other children, which point to an ‘object choice’ such as we find with adults. Also, admittedly, to a quite remarkable changeableness and a polygamous disposition.
In the winter (he is 33⁄4) I take Hans with me to the skating-rink and introduce him to my colleague N.’s little daughters, who are both about 10 years old. Hans sits down next to them: they, conscious of their greater maturity, look down with some contempt on the little squirt, while he gazes at them reverentially, which has next to no effect on them. Nevertheless, Hans refers to them now only as ‘his girls’. ‘Where have my girls gone? When are my girls coming?’, and for several weeks at home pesters me continually with ‘When can I go skating with my girls again?’
Hans’s 5-year-old cousin is here on a visit Hans, now 4, embraces him continually and during one of these tender embraces 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’7 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 (41⁄2) now has company. His playmates are our landlord’s children: Franzl (about 12), Fritzl (8), Olga (7), Berta (5), as well as 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’, and the following dialogue ensues:
Hans: ‘I’ll go downstairs and sleep with Mariedl, then.’
Mummy: ‘Do you really want to leave Mummy and sleep downstairs?’
Hans: ‘Well, I’ll come back up again in the morning, to have breakfast, and to do a wee.’
Mummy: ‘All right then, if you really want to leave Daddy and Mummy: don’t forget your jacket and trousers – bye-bye!’
Hans really does pick up his clothes and starts towards the stairs to go and sleep with Mariedl, but of course is fetched back.
(Behind the words ‘I want Mariedl to sleep with us’ there lies the other wish of course, that Mariedl, whose company he so enjoys, should become a part of our family. No doubt the fact that his mother and father allowed Hans to come into their bed, albeit only occasionally, awakened erotic feelings in him, and the desire to sleep with Mariedl can also be taken in an erotic sense. For Hans, as for all children, lying in bed with his father or mother is a source of erotic excitement.)
When challenged by his mother little Hans behaved like a real man despite his homosexual leanings.
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.
As I have no wish to prolong the state of emotional distress into which Hans has been thrown by his love for the little girl, I have effected an introduction and invited her to come and play in the garden one afternoon after Hans’s nap. Hans is so excited by the thought that the little girl is coming to see him that for the first time he cannot get to sleep, but tosses and turns restlessly. His mummy asks him, ‘Why can’t you sleep? Is it because you are thinking about the little girl?’ to which he replies happily, ‘Yes.’ When we left the restaurant after lunch he told everyone at home, ‘Listen, my girlfriend’s coming today’, and 14-year-old Mariedl reports that he asked her again and again. ‘Do you think she’ll be nice to me? Do you think she’ll give me a kiss if I kiss her?’, and so on and so forth.
But that afternoon it rained and so the visit was put off, and Hans had to be content with Berta and Olga for company.
Further observations made during the summer spent in Gmunden suggest that there are all sorts of new developments in the little boy’s world.
Hans, 41⁄4 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.’8
There is a striking contrast between the boldness Hans showed here towards his mother and a dream dating from around the same time. It is the first occasion when the content has been disguised by distortion, but the solution did not elude his father’s quick wits.
Hans, 41⁄4. Dream. This morning Hans came in and said: ‘Daddy, I thought something in the night. Someone says, “Who wants to come to me?” Then someone says, “Me.” Then he has to make him have a widdle.’
Further questions made it clear that there was no visual element in this dream, which falls into the category of type auditif. For the past few days Hans has been playing parlour games, including forfeit games, with the caretakers children, among them his friends Olga (7) and Berta (5). (A: Whose is this forfeit I hold in my hand? B: Mine. Then they decide what B has to do.) The dream follows the model of the forfeit game, except that Hans doesn’t want the person with the forfeit sentenced to the usual kiss, or box on the ears, but to a widdle; more precisely, someone has to make him do a widdle.
I get him to tell me the dream again; he uses the same words but replaces ‘then someone says’ with ‘then she says’. Translated, then, the dream goes as follows: I am playingforfeits with the girls. I ask, ‘Who wants to come to me?’ She (Berta or Olga) answers: ‘Me.’ Then she must make me do a widdle (i.e. help me urinate, something which Hans clearly finds agreeable).
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 [Fixierung] on his father.
Two days earlier, as noted, when his mother was washing and putting talcum powder on the genital area, he asked her, ‘Why don’t you touch me there?’ 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, in the charming guise of a forfeit game. – Since then I have repeatedly observed that he does not wish to be seen when doing a widdle.
I remark here merely that this dream conforms to the rule formulated in Die Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] (p. 283f., 7th edition), namely that speech which occurs in dreams can be traced back to speech uttered or heard in the days immediately preceding the dream.
A further observation was noted by Hans’s father in the weeks immediately following their return to Vienna:
Hans (41⁄2) is again watching his little sister being bathed and starts to laugh. Asked, ‘Why are you laughing?’ he replies, ‘I’m laughing at Hannas 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.
1. ‘Bruchstuck einer Hysterie-Analyse’ [‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’] (1905).
2. [Addition 1923:] Since the publication of this essay the theory of the castration complex has been further developed by contributions from Lou Andreas, A. Stärcke, F. Alexander and others. It has been asserted that the infant must experience every withdrawal of the mother’s breast as a kind of castration, i.e. as the loss of a significant body part that is felt to belong to the infant itself; that the regular passing of stools must be interpreted in exactly the same way; that the very act of birth, the separation from the mother with whom the infant previously formed a single whole, is the archetype of all castration. While recognizing all these as roots of the complex, I have nevertheless argued that the name ‘castration complex’ should be limited to those excitations and consequences that are bound up with the loss of the penis. Anyone who has become convinced that the castration complex is inevitably present in the analysis of adults will naturally find it difficult to trace it back to a chance threat, which does not after all occur all that frequently, and must assume that the child reconstructs [konstruiert] this dangerous possibility for itself on the basis of the vaguest hints, which are never in short supply, after all. This was also the thinking that provoked a search for the deeper roots of the complex in general experience. Thus it is all the more valuable that in little Hans’s case the threat of castration was reported by the parents, and that it occurred at a time when there was no question of any phobia.
3. Typical behaviour again. In the same situation another little boy, only 2 years older than his sibling, used to fend off admiring comments with the words ‘Too li’l, too li’l’.
4. ‘The stork can take him back again’: thus another rather older child welcomed his baby brother. Compare my remarks in Die Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] on dreams concerning the death of close relatives (p. 173f., 8th edition).
5. I have been told of two other little boys who, on being allowed a first curious look at their baby sister’s body, passed the same judgement as Hans using identical words and followed up by the same expectation. One might regard this premature corruption of the child’s intellect with horror. Why do these youthful researchers not acknowledge what they really see, namely that there is no widdler present? In little Hans’s case we can at least provide a full explanation for his deficient powers of observation. We know that through careful induction he had arrived at the general principle that all animate beings, by contrast with inanimate ones, possess a widdler; his mother reinforced this conviction by providing corroboration of it with regard to people whom he was unable to observe himself. He is now utterly incapable of ceding this hard-won position because of a single occasion on which he had observed his little sister. And so he judges that there is a widdler present in this case too, just a very small one; but it will grow until it is as big as a horse’s.
Let us go further to save little Hans’s honour. As it happens, he has behaved no worse than a philosopher of the Wundt school. The latter considers consciousness to be the essential quality of the soul, just as Hans considers the widdler to be the indispensable characteristic of all living things. Should the philosopher now come across inner processes that must be inferred, but where no trace of consciousness can be detected – i.e. one knows nothing of them but has no choice but to infer them – he does not say that these are unconscious inner processes but calls them faintly conscious. The widdler is just really tiny still! And as far as this comparison goes, little Hans still has the advantage. For here too, as is so frequently the case in children’s sexual research, a piece of correct knowledge is concealed behind the error. It is indeed true that the baby girl possesses a little widdler, which we call the clitoris, although it will not grow but remains stunted, (Cf. my short paper ‘Über infantile Sexualtheorien’ [‘The Sexual Theories of Children’] [1908].)
6. [Translator’s note: The German word Schwanz (tail) is also a slang word for penis.]
7. W[ilhelm] Busch: Und die Liebe per Distanz, Kurzgesagt, missfällt mir ganz. [Love at a distance, I must say/Is not for me, is not the way.]
8. I was told of a similar attempt at seduction by a three-year-old girl, whose mother – herself neurotic – refused to believe in infantile masturbation. She had had knickers made for the little girl and was checking that the crotch was not too tight by stroking upwards on the inner thigh. Suddenly the child closed her legs over her mother’s hand and begged, ‘Mummy, leave your hand there. It feels so nice,’