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‘Does the Professor talk to God?’ So asked Little Hans, child psychotherapy's proto-patient, on hearing Freud's first interpretation addressed directly to him. Of course, Freud was delighted at the child's reaction. But what exactly did it signify? Did the child mean that he had been blest with a heavensent insight about those horses that reared and threatened to bite? Did he just think that his father's friend looked rather like those awesome holy men in the synagogue who used God-talk that little children weren't expected to understand? Or was it because ‘the Professor’ claimed to know the child's past, as well as the future? After all, he had just said:
Long before he was in the world… I had known that a little Hans would come who would be so fond of his mother that he would be bound to feel afraid of his father because of it; and I had told his father this.
I was reminded of the Little Hans episode on reading Eric Rhode's two slim volumes for a number of reasons. Their tone is hieratic, the style lofty, if not quite aloof, creating in the reader a sense of bewilderment or marvel, or a mixture of both, that made me readily identify with the probable sentiments of the young Hans on hearing that first disquisition of Freud. What does he mean? Is what I think he means what he actually means? And if so, how does he know what he professes to know?
Nor is that the only connection. Freud invokes knowledge of a past known yet unknown to his listener; discerning in that past a pattern linking the past thus perceived to present and future. In doing so he speaks like a ‘seer’, believable only on condition of the child himself seeing rightness in his quasi-prophetic perspective. Most of Rhode's readers, I imagine, (at least those who are psychotherapists) will be largely ignorant of the philosophical and other antecedents that he rehearses in the course of his argument. One is invited to accept the past so described as a means of gaining a perspective on the