The Case of Little Hans

In 1909 Sigmund Freud published Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, a case study built around Herbert Graf, a Viennese child known in the psychoanalytic literature by the pseudonym Little Hans, whose father was an early follower of Freud and had been informally recording his son's development. Hans developed an intense fear of horses, particularly horses with dark markings around the mouth or blinkers, severe enough that he became frightened to leave the house, a fear his father traced to Hans having witnessed a horse collapse and apparently die in the street. Rather than treating the boy directly, Freud supervised the case largely through correspondence with the father, who conducted the actual conversations with Hans and reported them back. Freud interpreted the horse phobia as a displaced expression of the Oedipus complex and an underlying fear of castration connected to Hans's father, with the horse's dark mouth markings representing his father's mustache and beard and its blinkers representing his father's glasses. The case became the first published instance in which material drawn directly from the treatment of a child was offered as clinical evidence for Freud's theory of infantile sexuality, and it remains a foundational, if heavily disputed, text in the history of psychoanalysis.