A Reassessment of Little Hans, his Parents, and his Castration Complex

The genesis of my writing this paper was the astonishment and dismay I felt after appearing on a panel in 1989 reevaluating the case of Little Hans 80 years after its publication. My two colleagues on the panel, both highly regarded, senior training analysts, both influential teachers in two major psychoanalytic institutes in this area, steadfastly maintained that the etiology of Little Hans's neurosis was the strength of his instinctual drives. Both dismissed as etiologically irrelevant his parents' behavior with him.

I have no doubt that biology influences psychology, nor do I question the existence of infantile sexuality, but I do strongly differ with them and with Anna Freud who, 70 years after the original publication, wrote that the Little Hans case was “a more or less typical occurrence” that demonstrated the “unavoidable difficulties” in overcoming “the innate instinctual components of his mind,” and that Hans's “neurotic entanglements being due to a quantitative factor, namely the discrepancy between the strength of his own drives and the strength of his own ego” (1980).

I differ with Freud's conclusions and, more importantly, with Anna Freud's 1980 conclusions, as given above and to be quoted later in this paper. I believe psychoanalytic advances as well as newer understanding of psychological development derived from infant research adds considerable evidence to my position, which is almost directly contrary to Freud's and Anna Freud's. I propose here that Hans's parents contributed significantly to the development of Hans's neurosis and, in contrast, see little evidence of Hans's instinctual constitution in the etiology of his neurosis. It is