‘The Child is Father of the Man’
Although it is Little Hans’s appetite for knowledge that provides the focus for Freud’s scientific study, there is obviously more than one Wissbegierde at play in the case-history as it is recorded. Indeed, Freud’s only child-analysis tells the story of a three-way research project in which Freud, Hans’s father, and Little Hans himself work harmoniously towards the eradication of Hans’s phobia. Freud adduced that the success of Little Hans’s treatment lay to a great extent in the combination of ‘affectionate care and scientific interest’ which was consolidated in a single figure: The combined authority of a father and a physician was for Freud integral to the mediation of Hans’s researches (1909b: 5). It is the character of this mediation to which I shall finally turn.
Hans’s capacity for pleasure is smiled upon throughout the case history of 1909; but whilst there is no doubting Freud’s affection for and enchantment with his ‘positive paragon of all the vices’ (1909b: 15), ultimately the case history is not explicitly concerned to celebrate Hans’s ‘condition’—either the phobia specifically, or childhood more generally. Having identified as critical to Hans’s symptomatology the ‘vital gap’ in his epistemological landscape, Freud simultaneously locates this gap as the source from which Hans’s idiosyncratic vocabulary evolves; e.g. his language of biting horses and crumpled giraffes, the irresistible widdlers, the faecal ‘lumf’ and his imaginary children, ‘coaxing’ with Mummy, and so on. This vocabulary is both the expression of Hans’s researches (for example, in accordance with the cloacal theory of birth, Hans speaks of ‘lumf’ and ‘my children’ proximately) and an obvious reflection of his ambivalent fantasies. In an alternative nineteenth century neo-romantic discourse of childhood, Freud might have designated such fantastical language as a source of ‘truth’, and identified Hans’s creativity as pointing the way to an aesthetic and/or ethical ideal. However, overwhelmingly for Freud, such vocabulary points the way to neurosis.
There is little doubt that the dialogue throughout the case-history between the co-analysts (Freud and Little Hans’s father) reflects a commitment to answering the riddles of sexuality in accordance with the pragmatic demands of the reality principle. Freud choreographs Hans’s ‘enlightenment’ and advises the father on how to administer it to best effect. A two-stage strategy is followed: Hans is to be enlightened regarding the link between his anxiety and his attempts to break his masturbatory habits, and he is to be enlightened in the matter of sexual knowledge, especially regarding the differences between the sexes. Not only is it the father who makes possible the entire enterprise by providing access to the analytic material, but it is also the father who, in bearing his adult responsibilities towards his child with diligence and intellectual honesty, displays the resolve required to adhere to Freud’s counsel on matters of childrearing. Thus, Hans is, at least in part, able to conduct his investigations precisely because the father expresses the same audacious desire for knowledge as his son (i.e. the father is able to respond in kind to Hans’s sapere aude). This in turn positions the father as a representative of science who has succeeded in his own education to reality and who is therefore equipped to fulfil the task of mediating his son’s researches.