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The Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex has often been criticized from both within and without psychoanalytic circles. Many critics have suggested that the theory is an overgeneralization by Freud of bourgeois family patterns in turn-of-the-century Vienna, citing anthropological studies of other societies, historical and sociological data, or the unscientific nature of Freudian methodology as evidence against the theory. Few critics have offered counterarguments based on psychoanalytic evidence.
These approaches bear the initial disadvantage of using data unlike Freud's, the relevance of which is open to dispute. They also presuppose, or at least tacitly accept, the validity of Freud's model in its own cultural and clinical setting—a setting that still bears a considerable degree of similarity to our own.
Such difficulties suggest the desirability of re-examining the Oedipus complex in terms of Freud's own evidence—the psychoanalytic histories upon which the theory was based—in assessing its usefulness as an interpretive device in clinical practice. The case of Little Hans (“Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy”), although it postdates the development of the theory of the Oedipus complex, offers several advantages in making such a re-examination. Not only was it considered by Freud to be a direct substantiation of his ideas,1bb but it both takes place during the period in early childhood contemporaneous with the postulated relationships and events, and provides a large amount of detailed, sequential raw data in the form of conversations between Hans and his parents and observations by the father, which were written as the phobia progressed rather than with the selectivity and forgetfulness of hindsight.