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Infantile neurosis is Freud's term for the disturbances and stresses that he considered to be the common fate of all human beings when they pass through the phallic-oedipal phase of development. He said: “… the neuroses of childhood are in the nature of regular episodes in a child's development” (1926a, p. 148). “We know that a human child cannot successfully complete its development … without passing through a phase of neurosis sometimes of greater and sometimes of less distinctness” (1927, p. 42). “It has been found to be characteristic of a normal individual that he learns to master his Oedipus complex, whereas the neurotic subject remains involved in it” (1923, pp. 245-246).
He stated explicitly on several occasions that the oedipus complex is the “nuclear complex” of neurosis. Thus, he said: “It is to be suspected that, together with its extensions, it constitutes the nuclear complex of every neurosis, and we may expect to find it no less actively at work in other regions of mental life” (1910, p. 47). And: “… infantile sexuality, which is held under repression, acts as the chief motive force in the formation of symptoms; and the essential part of its content, the Oedipus complex, is the nuclear complex of neuroses” (1919, p. 204).
Little Hans, as is well known, was the first case of “infantile neurosis” ever treated by the psychoanalytic method.