The Sigmund Freud Archives is pleased to announce that the interviews of Max and Herbert Graf by the late K.R. Eissler are derestricted and available to be read at the Library of Congress. These interviews of “Little Hans” (1959) and his father (1952) shed new light on Freud's famous case history. The new information is likely to extend and modify this original, first case report of a child analytic treatment and to provide fresh perspectives.
An eminent prolific author, critic, lecturer, and musicologist, Max Graf (1873-1958) has a special place in the history of psychoanalysis as the father of Little Hans (Herbert Graf, 1903-1973). The father attempted the first child analysis, of his own son, “supervised” or coached by Sigmund Freud. The treatment findings were published by Freud (1909) as “The Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy.” This precursor and landmark of child analysis, which caused great excitement and controversy when first published, continues to generate great interest.
Max Graf met Freud through his wife, who had been Freud's patient. He was an early member of Freud's Wednesday night study group, leaving in 1911 in close conjunction with the resignation of Alfred Adler and his proponents. Max Graf contributed some of the initial papers on applied analysis, e.g., on artistic creativity and on Wagner's opera, The Flying Dutchman.
Freud urged his colleagues in the study group to collect developmental data on their own children. The Grafs complied, keeping notes, recording dreams, and expecting to rear their children with Freudian enlightenment. Remarkably, considering their son's horse phobia, Freud climbed four flights of stairs to bring Little Hans a gift of a rocking horse. During his treatment of his son, Max Graf brought his notes to Freud for consultation and evaluation. In subsequent years, many authors have commented on Little Hans. Psychoanalytic theory, developmental knowledge, and clinical experience with parents and children have expanded far beyond the first explorations of the pioneer period.
Little Hans grown up: Herbert Graf, Met stage director, rehearsing Un Ballo in Maschera with Marian Anderson at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1955.
Little Hans's phobia and its overdetermination can be elaborated and reformulated in terms of parental, sibling, and sociocultural factors, and as with all of Freud's cases, in the light of contemporary psychoanalytic thought. These newly derestricted interviews of Max Graf and of Herbert Graf contribute to the new data and inferences, which add to the original case report and raise questions about the initial conclusions.
The de-restriction of this material is consistent with the policy of the Sigmund Freud Archives to release Freud documents as soon as legal and ethical constraints permit. During the last 15 years, the publication of the vast majority of Freud correspondence and documents has been made possible and greatly facilitated by this policy of de-restriction.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Harold P. Blum, M.D., is executive director of the Sigmund Freud Archives.