Freud respectfully declares that at the age of three and three quarters Little Hans was on his way to ‘making an independent discovery of correct categories by means of his observation’ (1907c: 133-134). In due course, this discovery would encompass a knowledge of the differences between the sexes. Before such knowledge is realised however, Hans progresses towards it with the working hypothesis that, ‘a dog and a horse have widdlers, a table and a chair haven’t’ (1909b: 9). We might say that Hans’s commitment to organising the contents of his world according to the distinction between the widdler-haves and the widdler-have-nots is, for Freud, testament to the drive of the researcher. On one level, Hans’s categorising impulse only confirms his narcissistic self-investments; there is clearly an appropriative and sexually driven meaning to the fact that Hans won’t admit lack within this environment of care—i.e. he cannot allow that his mother is not a replica of himself. However, as Freud’s theory of narcissism makes clear, the state of infant narcissism is always more than ignorant self-investment.6 ((An example of Freud’s admiration for the narcissist can be seen in his references to the ‘charm’ of the narcissistic infant (e.g. Freud, 1914c: 88). ))If we are prepared to read the investments of narcissism as primitive modes of self-reflection, we can see how it is precisely Hans’s researches—his attempts to acquire knowledge in order to consolidate his identity and to valorise himself—which expose him to his potential lack. Hence, Little Hans’s research, though related to the sexual instincts—to master his environment and support his illusions of self-sufficiency—is not simply identical to these instincts. It is this non-identity that accounts for Freud’s commendation of Hans, but which also precipitates the child’s breakdown. In fact, as we shall come to see, it is Hans’s breakdown which demonstrates his integrity as a researcher.
When Freud later comes to consider why it is that Hans would insist on the presence of his mother’s and sister’s widdlers, when in fact there were none for him to observe, he returns to the basic categorisation between the widdler-haves and the have-nots. He describes how, by ‘a process of careful induction’, Hans had arrived at the general proposition that, ‘every animate object, in contradistinction to inanimate ones, possesses a widdler’ (1909b: 11). This proposition, which is corroborated by his mother, acquires the status of a belief and Little Hans becomes utterly unable to surrender it on the strength of the single observation made at bath-time of his little sister’s non-possession of a widdler. This is where the limits of Hans’s investigative maturity, and the boundaries of his narcissistic investments, are tested, as he falsifies his observations to give support to a hard-won article of belief. In other words he insists that his sister’s widdler—which is not there to be perceived—is in fact just very small.
Freud is greatly impressed by Hans’s efforts to apprehend the ‘grand problems of life’ and, conceding that every investigator runs the risk of falling into occasional errors, he uses the infant’s example here to reproach his own contemporaries.
…he [Hans] was behaving no worse than a philosopher of the school of Wundt. In the view of that school, consciousness is the invaluable characteristic of what is mental, just as in the view of little Hans a widdler is the indispensable criterion of what is animate. If now the philosopher comes across mental processes whose existence cannot but be inferred but about which there is not a trace of consciousness to be detected … then, instead of saying that they are unconscious mental processes, he calls them semi-conscious. The widdler’s still very small! (Freud, 1909b: 11).
With chastising wit, Freud is again demarcating the ground for analytic research in distinction to the researches of certain philosophers, children, or occultists who, as we saw above, prefer the ‘dazzling brilliance of a flawless theory’ to the ‘fragmentary pieces of [analytic] knowledge’. The error in all cases is legitimated and further compounded by the inductive reasoning that follows it; ‘faulty perceptions’ are generated to support the originary premise. Since science (and hence psychoanalytic research) is not in the business of providing a secure knowledge system or supporting a particular Weltanschauung (whether it be derived from the premise that all animate objects possess a widdler, or that all mental processes belong to consciousness), it is less susceptible to disavowing what, for Freud, would be the evidence of analytic observation. It is in this vein that Freud insists that psychoanalysis has but a ‘few apodeictic propositions in its catechism’, and can thus find satisfaction in ‘pursuing approximations to certainty in spite of the absence of final confirmation’ (1916-17: 51). Predictably, Freud is more forgiving of the child’s struggle to relinquish his catechism than of the infantile failures of his fellow philosophers to relinquish theirs. It is precisely the task of childhood after all to begin to recognise, via the doubting and brooding prompted by the riddles of sexuality, the extent of one’s own castration (i.e. to discover not that the widdler’s still very small, but that on some register it is lacking altogether).