Abstract
Freud's "Little Hans" (the Lacanian way) consists of three main parts: 1) a new translation of the Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy (1909), with my comments under line; 2) a condensation of Lacan's (and J.-A. Miller's) Séminaire 4: La relation d'objet (1956-1957), The object relation, the second half of the book representing Lacan's re-interpretation of the case, with my explanatory remarks; 3) Commentaries to the case.
These commentaries comprise a) Chronology of events and fantasies before and during the phobia; b) A preliminary explanation of the chronology of the case; c) Afterlife of the case: there exist other re-interpretations of "little Hans", mainly the modern ones, e. g. in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly and in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association; sometimes, it seems that they are done in the spirit of the "real environment" (instead of "phantasies") criticised by Lacan, and even in the spirit of contemporary "political correctness"; d) Hided identities, betrayed identities...: modern re-interpretations are working with "Hans" known to become the famous opera director Herbert Graf, and with his parents, Max Graf and Olga Hönig-Graf, and also with the new evidence from the Freud Archives, in the Kurt Eissler's interviews, mainly with Max and Herbert. It becomes clear that Herbert was worried about his childhood phobia and about of the revelation of his Hans-identity (sometimes in the '50s); in his adult life he passed twice through a psychoanalytical therapy and his last doctor advised him to present himself to Anna Freud during a psychoanalytical congress in Geneva in 1970 (to give back his story to the Freud's heiress?); then, in 1972 he makes an interview with Francis Rizzo about his opera career (where the phobia is literally written off), and during a cancer disease he falls and dies in 1973 (Roudinesco and Plon, 1997, p. 393): one could say he falls and makes a row, "Krawall", with his legs, like the horse in his phobia; e) What kind of identity?: Lacan suggests little Hans did not pass through his Oedipus in an exemplary way.
He predicts to him, en gros: Hans will become heterosexual and on a homosexual attack, he will respond with counter-biting (like a horse?). Nevertheless, he will represent by his total person, by his stature, a phallus; and the women he will choose would also be these girls = phallus, his mistresses, with which he will be struggling, competing for the dominance.
The kind of a knight, of a cavalier. This, we can say, fits well to Herbert's biography, with his marital problems and with his conflicts with some great men's authority.
In Lacan's view it was caused by the insufficient role of Hans' father which was not able to effectuate a symbolic castration on his son, being too gentle. Hans has done his castration (if it was a complete one) of his own, proceeding with imaginary figures of a locksmith and a plumber.
In the view of new accounts about the father Max, it seems he was not simply too gentle, but rather narcissistic, trying to be gentle, comprehensive, and admired for this. Herbert admired his father in a childish manner even till the end, but this was also the way to get him off his own life.
Modern psychanalysts mention some other concepts (as "negative oedipal" resolution of conflicts, passive-feminine identification with the mother and so on), but it seems everybody agrees, Hans' Oedipus was not resolved so correctly as Freud wants it to be; f) Freud's vs. Lacan's approach to the case: Freud is working mainly in terms of instincts or drives, of their repression, of irreversible change of the libidinal pleasure into anxiety, whereas Lacan mainly with identification (identification with the little other or great Other, but also with the phallus), in this phase of his "return to Freud".
Nevertheless, both authors meet in the middle of the scale where Hans produces his symptoms and phantasies and one author overlaps with his thoughts the field of the other. So, Lacan cannot ignore completely the drives, and he tries to join their unconscious provenance with the presence of the Other; g) Alternative thoughts: the success of Lacan's re-interpretation was partly due to his inspiration by Lévi-Strauss' analysis of myth.
But I do not agree completely with some Lacan's results. For instance, the signifier "horse".
Lacan states that the horse represents first the mother, then the father and meantime Hans, too. In my opinion the historically first horse was the father, but before the phobia itself, in Gmunden, where we can speak about Hans' Oedipus; then it became the nightmare, when the mother split up in the "mummy" and the mare: the idea of biting horse-father was suggested to Hans by the father and by Freud, but rather falsely.
Besides this, the signifier "horse" is not analyzed completely. Lacan states the horse is a place for real penis, but it seems to represent, when making joke, the "horse power" (like the power of a motor): the horse is the creature which should possess it. (Lacan will return to the power of the phallus and to the castration in subsequent Seminars.) Another alternative thought refers to the possibility of using for explanation not only the model of myth, but also the model of fairy tale, in the Vladimir Propp's version.
One could risk the hypothesis that a fairy tale is a myth without its collective, tribal (cosmologic) side. It is treating directly the Oedipus complex connections: that is the reason why it is read to children before their sleep and dreaming. (It contains also a happy-end with the victory of the hero, and so it can forestall the appearance of a nightmare.) When we see Hans' phobia in the fairy tale perspective, the atmosphere of scenes will change.
For example, the first great phantasy with the locksmith is described by Lacan like a trauma: experiencing a great hole in the belly, done by a monster. In my qualification it means that the hero is signed as hero by a so-called (by Propp) Helper, and this on that place of his body, where in fact a scar exists, from ever: on his navel.
The fairy tale scheme fits the story of Little Hans as a passage rite where the hero changes after the ordeals undergone which are to legitimate his transformation into a new person. The problem is that he does not receive his phallus after the castration by his father from the father, but "directly" from a social super-ego, and that this authority, Hans is, in a certain sense, duping it (he buys from the State, from the Kaiser a private engine).