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As I listened to the papers at the Conference on the Oedipus Complex in the 21st Century, I noted what, in my mind, constituted a paradox: The clinical material presented pointed to childhood trauma and abuse as the evident basis for the pathology of the patients described. Yet these treatments were meant to illustrate pathology rooted in the Oedipus complex. In my opinion, if the environmental factors such as early trauma, maternal depression, and abuse are more than adequate to explain these patients' ambivalent murderous and sexual feelings toward their parents, there is no need to superimpose an explanation based on an innate universal fantasy, the Oedipus complex. This occurred to me especially in light of John Munder Ross's paper, in which he elucidated the hitherto unavailable findings of the “Little Hans” case (Freud, 1909) that had become available when the Freud archives were opened. These findings had been published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2007. I had not read them then, but I certainly did after that meeting. (Also see Munder Ross, this issue.)
In the Little Hans case, Freud adduced his most compelling evidence for the positive Oedipus complex and claimed it to be a universal phenomenon. He even referred to Little Hans as “Little Oedipus” (Freud, 1909, p. 111). Even before the archives were opened, there had been an accumulation of critical literature (e.g., Frankiel, 1992; Silverman, 2001) that questioned the role of Little Hans's mother in fostering his horse phobia and his castration anxiety. Freud's reluctance to recognize the mother's role as a source of his anxiety and phobia was also noted. However, the ultimate question, the way in which the Little Hans case was used by Freud to support his assumption of a universal Oedipus complex, remained unchallenged. To challenge it is what I intend to do in this article.
As had become well-known even before 2007, Little Hans was actually Herbert Graf, son of Ma