Little Hans’s Wissbegierde and the Wiwimacher
Herbert Graf, (the real name of ‘Little Hans’), made his debut on the psychoanalytic stage two years prior to Freud’s publication of his full case history in 1909. In his open letter to a Hamburg Physician (Dr. M. Fürst), Freud deploys Little Hans (then Herbert) evidentially to support his thesis that ‘sexuality should be treated like anything else that is worth knowing about’ (1907c: 138). He argues that the attitude of myth-making that adults adopt in front of their children with regard to sexual matters countervails the intellectual interest and desire for sexual knowledge that the child displays from an early age. Throughout this short piece, Freud shows open disdain for the failure of the so-called enlighteners (i.e. parents and educators) to respond in kind to the sapere aude spirit of the child. Freud is clear in his letter of 1907 that Little Hans and his fellow amateur sexual theorists (i.e. other children) are neither unusually sensual nor pathologically disposed, rather their spirit of enquiry is the natural stance of the unintimidated infant who has not been oppressed by a sense of guilt (135). At this time in his own research, Freud’s purpose is to highlight the dangers of ‘customary prudishness’ in concealing or withholding sexual enlightenment. However, as we would expect, what becomes clear in the full case history is that the source of the child’s ‘oppression by a sense of guilt’ cannot be fully ascribed to the empirical reality of the parenting environment.
Freud tells us that one of the three guiding sexual theories that children develop consists in attributing to everyone, including females, the possession of a penis; ‘the boy’s estimate of its value is logically reflected in his inability to imagine a person like himself who is without this essential constituent’ (1908c: 215-216). In the case of Little Hans, Freud notes the infant’s lively interest in the part of his body which he calls his ‘widdler’ (Wiwimacher) and recounts his examinations of the material of his everyday life, (a life which prior to 1908 was not marked by phobic anxiety). The widdler motif is ubiquitous: Hans observes milk coming out of the cow’s, water coming out of an engine’s; he is fascinated by the widdlers of his mother and his younger sister (who feature prominently in the full case history); and he takes great interest in the widdlers of the animals that he encounters at the zoo and elsewhere (e.g. lions, giraffes, horses). Freud explains that the openness with which animals display their genitals and sexual function is clearly connected to Hans’s sexual curiosity (1909b: 9). Describing Hans’s excitement at seeing a lion’s widdler at the zoo, Freud gestures towards a distinction between the component parts of the infant’s Wissbegierde: sexual curiosity is held in tandem with a distinct ‘spirit of enquiry’ (1909b: 9).
Freud was to reiterate the ambiguity of this position in a passage added to his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1915. Here, and in a way which affirms Blass’s argument noted above, he offers a conception of Wissbegierde as both independent of and connected to the sexual instincts:
At about the same time as the sexual life of children reaches its first peak, between the ages of three and five, they also begin to show signs of the activity which may be ascribed to the instinct for knowledge or research. This instinct cannot be counted among the elementary instinctual components, nor can it be classed as exclusively belonging to sexuality. Its activity corresponds on the one hand to a sublimated manner of obtaining mastery, while on the other hand it makes use of the energy of scopophilia. Its relations to sexual life, however, are of particular importance, since we have learnt from psycho-analysis that the instinct for knowledge in children is attracted unexpectedly early and intensively to sexual problems and is in fact possibly first aroused by them (Freud, 1905d [added in 1915]: 193) [my emphasis].
In what is Freud’s most explicit statement on the research instinct in children, it seems that the problems regarding the position of Wissbegierde in the order of the instincts are unresolved (i.e. the instinct for research is neither simply primary nor simply derivative). This apparent ambiguity can be usefully inflected once we note that this passage was added in 1915 and rests therefore upon the presence of Freud’s theory of narcissism. Once narcissism is set as the formative state from which modes of loving derive, the question of Wissbegierde’s autonomy from the sexual instincts can be re-framed.