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In this article the author suggests a reading of Freud's paper “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” (Freud, 1909) through the lens of Winnicott's teachings.
She begins with a short overview of Sigmund Freud's theory of sexuality. She shows that Freud widened the range over which the term “sexual” could justifiably be applied. She emphasizes the Freudian subject is constituted by his unconscious sexuality.
This short overview is followed by a larger description of Winnicott's developmental theory. The author enlarges two Winnicottian concepts ‘being’ and ‘doing’. It is argued “being” is the simplest of all experiences, it precedes any form or structure, any impulse or emotion and every interaction between the individual and others. ‘Doing’ is the name of drives dimension. The individual of ‘being’ is present and united, that is all. The individual in a state of doing is tempestuous and yearning, stormy and guilty, struggling and surrendering, and on and on. Ontologically and developmentally ‘being’ precedes ‘doing’ as Winnicott put it: “After being - doing and being done to. But first, being.”
The two psychoanalytical paradigms can be shortly stated as such: The Winnicottian baby nurses from a mother with whom they are united, or from a breast that is the self, whereas the Freudian baby nurses from a mother who is the object of his erotic love.
In the last part of this article the author reads selected episodes from the case study of Little Hans, particularly those dealing with the emergence of his disorder, and interprets them in a Winnicottian way. Thus, while Freud confines the castration complex to those excitations and consequences which are bound up with the loss of the penis, Winnicott would agree with a later conceptualization, arguing that every time the mother's breast is withdrawn from a baby, he is bound to feel it as castration (that is to say, as the loss of what he regards as an important part of his own body).
A prologue in the beginning and an epilogue in the end put the whole article in a historian context including little Hans real identity, thus showing the multidimensional character of psychoanalytic theory.