“Little Hans” and the Poetics of Anxiety: Taking Analysis to Task

In the spring of 1922, “Little Hans,” now at the age of nineteen, introduces himself again to Freud, fourteen years after the analysis via his father of his anxiety hysteria. The meeting is then recorded by Freud in a laconic postscript to the case history, previously published in 1909. Here Freud recounts the apparent success of the analysis, relating that the early analysis did not prevent his young patient from growing happily into adulthood. One thing, however, continues to trouble Freud, for which he is unable to account. The final of the three paragraphs of the “Postscript” to the Little Hans case history reads:

One piece of information given me by Little Hans struck me as particularly remarkable; nor do I venture to give any explanation of it. When he read his case history, he told me, the whole of it came to him as something unknown; he did not recognize himself; he could remember nothing; and it was only when he came upon the journey to Gmunden that there dawned on him a kind of glimmering recollection that it might have been he himself that it happened to. So the analysis had not preserved the events from amnesia, but had been overtaken by amnesia itself. Any one who is familiar with psycho-analysis may occasionally experience something similar in sleep. He will be woken up by a dream, and will decide to analyze it then and there; he will then go to sleep again feeling quite satisfied with the result of his efforts; and next morning dream and analysis will alike be forgotten. (148-49)

The overwhelming success of the amnesia, the forgetting of both the analysis and the phobia, would appear to be out of