Little Libertine
Around his third birthday, Little Hans begins showing “a quite peculiarly lively interest” in his penis, which he refers to as his “widdler.” And not just his own widdler but also the widdlers of those around him. He notes, for instance, how horses have big widdlers and how his baby sister has a little widdler, which of course is a strange comment since you and I know that little girls don’t have widdlers, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Hans’ father is a member of Freud’s inner circle, and he and his wife have done their best to raise their son according to progressive, psychologically informed values. Although, it should be added, they’re not perfectly modern, and when Hans develops the habit of playing with his widdler, his mother warns that if he keeps at it she’ll have the family doctor cut it off.
Shortly before his fourth birthday, Hans starts to go girl-crazy. When he notices a “pretty little girl” entering the restaurant where the family eats lunch, he can’t stop staring at her and blushes when she notices him. He later tells his mother, “I say, I should so like to sleep with the little girl.” Similar crushes follow — on girls he sees ice-skating, on girls in the neighborhood — and before long he’s going around hugging and kissing them.
One day, while his mother is tending to him after a bath, Hans playfully suggests how nice it would be if she touched his widdler. He later shares a dream expressing his wish that two girls he knew would “make me widdle,” that is, assist him in urinating.
Frightened Oedipus
Hans suddenly becomes inexplicably attached to his mother and anxious whenever she is away. Some mornings he wakes in tears, afraid she has gone for good. One day, while out with his nursemaid, he begins to cry and insists on going home “to coax with” — that is, to cuddle with — his mother.
Then a new anxiety appears. While leaving the house with his mother one morning, he suddenly bursts into tears, afraid that a horse will bite him. That night he tells her that he wants to stay inside, although he later fears that the horse might find a way to come into his room.
Puzzled, Hans’s father turns to Freud for advice. Freud conjectures that Hans’ fear of horses is a displaced fear of his own sexuality. He advises his father to interpret the fear to him: to tell Hans that his fear is not really about horses, but that he is “very fond of his mother and [wants] to be taken into her bed.”
Freud also suggests that the father give Hans some rudimentary sex education, explaining that females do not have widdlers. As mentioned above, Hans says that his sister has a widdler, despite seeing during her baths that she clearly has no widdler.
If you’re thinking that his belief sounds defensive — the kind of idea a little boy might come up with to ward off castration anxiety — then, first of all, you’re starting to think like an analyst. And second, you’re crazy if you think I’m going to spoil the book for you. If you want to know why the little guy thinks his sister has a widdler, you’re going to have to read to the end.
Enter Herr Professor
Hans’ symptoms temporarily lessen, but then one day he again expresses his fear of a horse biting him. His father then takes him to see Freud. During their brief visit, Hans shares that he is especially frightened by horses with blinders and black patches around their mouths. Freud interprets this as confirming his theory: the horse represents the father — the blinders recalling his spectacles, the dark muzzle his mustache.
Freud tells Hans that he’s afraid of his father because he is incredibly fond of his mother and he fears that this would make his father angry with him. Freud assures Hans that his father knows this but loves him anyway and encourages Hans to share his feelings.
Hans’ father then asks his son why he thinks he’s angry with him, and Hans says that he struck him that morning. The scene he had in mind involved him playfully head-butting his father in the stomach, causing his father to reflexively hit him with his hand. Freud interprets this encounter as evidence of Hans’ “hostile disposition” toward his father and also “a manifestation of a need for getting punished for it.”
The Crumpled Giraffe
After this, Hans’ symptoms begin to steadily lessen, although there’s still much work to be done. He has intellectually understood Freud’s interpretation, but he still needs to work through the conflict in his own way and at his own pace.
At first he can only speak about his Oedipal wishes through symbols, telling his father the following fantasy: “In the night there was a big giraffe in the room and a crumpled one; and the big one called out because I took the crumpled one away from it. Then it stopped calling out; and then I sat down on top of the crumpled one.”
The crumpled giraffe represents his mother, and the big giraffe represents his father. Hans sitting on the crumpled giraffe represents his muddled, childlike understanding of intercourse. In this dramatization, he seems to be saying: “I should like to be doing something with my mother, something forbidden; I do not know what it is, but I do know that you are doing it too.”
Hans does not know what intercourse is, and if he did, he would no doubt be horrified. What he knows is that he wants to cuddle his mommy, to sleep next to her. He’d been nourished by her affection and touch as a baby, and when his father had briefly departed the previous summer, he had resumed sleeping with her and had relished being near her, enjoying her motherly caresses. When his father returned, he could no longer sleep in his mother’s bed, and so he started to wish that his father would go away. In time he developed the (unconscious wish) that his father would permanently go away, that is, die.
Not a Bad Character
Freud emphasizes that Hans is “not by any means a bad character.” The boy is kind, sensitive, and deeply affectionate. Long before his phobia, he wept when seeing a carousel horse whipped and could not bear to watch anyone cry. He loves his father, even as he resents him. As Freud puts it, Hans will strike his father and immediately kiss the spot he’s hit. Hans, in other words, is human.
The emotional life of man is in general made up of pairs of contraries such as these. Indeed, if it were not so, repressions and neuroses would perhaps never come about. In the adult these pairs of contrary emotions do not as a rule become simultaneously conscious except at the climaxes of passionate love; at other times they usually go on suppressing each other until one of them succeeds in keeping the other altogether out of sight. But in children they can exist peaceably side by side for quite a considerable time.
Hans’ father proves to be gentle and understanding. He navigates their exchanges with playfulness and flexibility, helping his son find words for his feelings, even those that are forbidden or difficult to express. And that is the goal — not the full release of the id, but understanding it. And there ought to be no shame in that. As Hans himself puts it: “But wanting’s not doing, and doing’s not wanting.”