Letter to the Editor

DEAR SIR,

Within 14 months, two articles appeared in publications not related to psychoanalysis, but carrying information which might be of interest to analysts. The two publications are (The Metropolitan) Opera News and Time Magazine.

In the 5 February 1972 issue of Opera News, the first of a four-part biography of Herbert Graf, the former stage director of the 'Met' appeared. The author discusses Graf's father, Max Graf, a Viennese man of letters of the turn of the century. Graf is asked about his father's circle of friends and associates which included: Brahms, Bruckner, Einstein, Mahler (his godfather), Kokoschka, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg and Alban Berg. His father was also an associate and collaborator of Sigmund Freud. Graf states of his father:

He was also a member of Freud's inner circle and an early champion of his theories. He was in fact the first to apply the psychoanalytic method to the study of the creative process, with his paper 'Wagner im Fliegenden Holländer'. And he was one of the first Freudian therapists as well. When I was still very young, I developed a neurotic fear of horses. Freud gave me a preliminary examination and then directed treatment with my father acting as go-between, using a kind of question-and-answer game which later became standard practice in child psychiatry. Freud documented my cure in his 1909 paper 'Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy', and as the first application of psychoanalytic technique to childhood neurosis the 'Little Hans' case, as it's popularly known, is still a classic study in the field.

I remembered nothing of all this until years later, when I came upon the article in my father's study and recognized some of the names and places Freud had left unchanged. In a state of high excitement I called on the great doctor in his Berggasse office and presented myself as 'Little Hans'. Behind his desk, Freud looked like those busts of the bearded Greek philosophers I'd seen at school. He rose and e