Postscript: Reconstructing Our Collective Past

More than a century has passed since Freud first met Olga Hönig and Max Graf; nearly a century since he published the “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy”; and a half-century since Herbert and Max Graf shared their recollections of “the Professor” with Kurt Eissler. What compels us to reexamine Freud's seminal case history so long after its conclusion, and what might we hope to gain from this exercise? How much can retrospection across a fifty-year gap tell us about the intentions and aims actually operating at the time of Hans's treatment? Do a few new morsels of information give us warrant to question Freud's original observations and conclusions? We weren't there! How does this inescapable fact motivate, limit, and perhaps enhance our understanding of what happened so long ago?

The passage of time and the deaths of the main players leave us wondering—with curiosity no longer fettered by deference to the living—what went on behind those closed doors. Like curious children, we set about our research. The same mixed motives—present, to varying degrees, in all of us—shape our individual responses to the material. Some, hoping for a glimpse of patrem nudam, seek snapshots of Freud in morally ambiguous poses (he checked into a hotel with Minna!). Others, hoping to uphold a cherished ideal, paint portraits of an unimpeachable forebear with a noble theoretical agenda, his errors few and largely inconsequential.

Each contributor to this section on Little Hans has tried to steer clear of both leering dismissal and blind idealization. This doesn't mean we've always succeeded, or that we can avoid other problems endemic to efforts at reconstruction. Like Hans (or any other child working at the mystery of his origins), we gather as much fact as possible, interpolating fantasy where fact fails. But we find that the line between fact and fantasy is a hard one to draw. (Freud faced this problem, too;