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Felix Boehm’s 1931 paper ‘The History of the Oedipus Complex’

focuses on a myth-cycle which, while frequently incestuous, generates children through non-sexual acts. He suggests that this is how children conceive of sex and that, as these classical myths formed when knowl-edge about propagation by fertilisation was very limited, the progress of human understanding of sex and reproduction follows the Freudian model of child development. Moreover,

our analytic work shews [sic] us that as the result of many thousands of years of evolution, it appears to have become a hereditary possession of our world. For, even in cases where patients have never known their father or mother, analysis always brings out again that in their unconscious the typical Oedipus complex can be uncovered. (Boehm 1931: 451)

For this history, Little Hans foregrounds a centrally vexing question for the repressive hypothesis – how do children come to know about sex?

Little Hans is Freud’s analysis of a father’s close observation of his son’s (now known to be Herbert Graf) psychosexual life across several years. While Freud declared Hans neurotic and that his case was thus not applicable to others (Freud 2002: 84), Hans’s story brings a range of core psychoanalytic themes into view. It infl uenced Freud’s thinking for years and also the work of those who followed him. Prior to publication, Little Hans was discussed by Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and ‘The Sexual Enlightenment of Children (An open letter to Dr. M. Fürst)’ (both 1907). Here Freud stresses the error of concealing the facts of sexual life from children (Freud 1953: 133), and his sub-sequent discussion of infantile sexuality refers to Little Hans. It merits quoting at length:

I know a delightful little boy, now four years old, whose understanding parents abstain from forcibly suppressing one part of the child’s develop-ment. Little Hans has certainly not been exposed to anything in the nature of seduction by a nurse, yet he has already for some time shown the liveliest interest in the part of the body which he calls his ‘widdler’. When he was only three he asked his mother: ‘Mummy, have you got a widdler too?’

His mother answered: ‘Of course. What did you think?’ He also asked his father the same question repeatedly. At the same age he was taken to a cow-shed for the fi rst time and saw a cow being milked. ‘Oh look!’ he said, in surprise, ‘there’s milk coming out of its widdler!’ At the age of three and three quarters he was on the way to making an independent discovery of correct categories by means of his observations. He saw some water being let out of an engine and said ‘Oh, look, the engine’s widdling. Where’s it got its widdler?’ He added afterwards in refl ective tones: ‘A dog and a horse have widdlers; a table and a chair haven’t.’ Recently he was watch-ing his seven-day-old little sister bewatch-ing given a bath. ‘But her widdler’s still quite small’, he remarked; ‘when she grows up it’ll get bigger all right.’ . . . I should like to say explicitly that little Hans is not a sensual child or at all pathologically disposed. The fact is simply, I think, that, not having been intimidated or oppressed with a sense of guilt, he gives expression quite ingenuously to what he thinks. (Freud 1953: 134–5)

Freud understands Little Hans’s curiosity about the body as enabled by freedom from guilt and shame. But Little Hans narrates the emergence of just these affects, and indeed a phobia directly related to his emerging awareness of ‘correct categories’, including ‘sex distinction’.

As Foucault suggests, Little Hans had enormous impact on discourse about ‘children’s sex’: ‘It is often said that the classical period consigned it to an obscurity from which it scarcely emerged before The Three Essays or the benefi cent anxieties of Little Hans’ (Foucault 1984: 26–7).

But Little Hans should properly name a fi eld of debate intersecting ques-tions of both theory and method. Little Hans is not only a narrative in which the Oedipal crisis is discovered but a site for Freud’s negotiations over the importance of child sexuality to a model of the self in which

‘Oedipus’ names both a necessary developmental turning point and a problem. The two principle components of Little Hans for the Oedipal model are Hans’s development of a ‘castration complex’ and the asso-ciation of this complex with the mystery of his parent’s relationship. For Freud, Hans is scared of the pleasure of his penis because he thinks his father will cut it off. And, again for Freud, Hans’s widdler is a potential threat to his father because he fantasises about using it to father children with his mother.

For Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Freud a misprision is imposed here. They refer to the analysts as ‘breaking [Little Hans’] rhizome and blotching his map’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 15). The following conversation between Hans and his father would be exemplary:

I: ‘One thing about Daddy that makes you cross is that Mummy loves him.’

Hans: ‘No.’

I: ‘Why do you always cry, then, when Mummy gives me a kiss? Because you’re jealous.’

Hans: ‘Yes, I know.’

I: ‘So what would you like to do, if you were the Daddy?’

Hans: ‘And you were Hans? – I’d like to take you to Lainz every Sunday, no, every day of the week. If I were the Daddy, I’d be ever so good.’

I: ‘What would you like to do with Mummy?’

Hans: ‘I’d take her to Lainz too.’

I: ‘And what else?’

Hans: ‘Nothing.’

I: ‘Why are you jealous, then?’

Hans: ‘I don’t know’ . . .

I: ‘Do you know why it’s something you wish? Because you’d like to be the Daddy.’

Hans: ‘Yes . . . How does it go?’

I: ‘How does what go?’ (Freud 2002: 71, 73–4)

Here, Hans’s desire to have fun (at Lainz) is reconstituted as het-erosexual and genital. The analyst/father insists that Hans feels some-thing particular for his mother, and insists on that being both genital and reproductive. At the same time, while Hans, clearly with the encouragement of analysis, is forever discovering widdlers everywhere – sometimes excitedly (lion), sometimes in terror (horse), and sometimes

with a mixture of curiosity, fear and assurance (his mother, his sister) – these are reduced to signifying the Oedipal father in a competitive sexual relationship to the mother.

Ken Corbett situates Hans as an archetypal fi gure of masculinity for the role he plays in grafting Oedipus from myth to person (Corbett 2009: 19). He notes that

The psychic states called ‘masculinity’ originate, according to Freud, through ‘biological function’, and for the boy are constituted through the penis: ‘In contrast to the later period of maturity, this period is marked not by a genital primacy but a primacy of the phallus.’ (Corbett 2009: 24) With this translation from ‘the penis as material reality’ to ‘psychic reality’ (Corbett 2009: 26) – or, as Jacques Lacan would put it, to a sym-bolic function (Lacan 2001: 74) – ‘the analysis of repression becomes Freud’s mark’ (Corbett 2009: 23). In the simultaneous emergence of desire and its repression, Little Hans gives a double resonance to Foucault’s phrase ‘the repressive hypothesis’ by exemplifying not only how psychoanalysis will reveal the sex repressed by an inadequately informed society but also how sexuality itself is formed by an individual process of repression.

Because Freud’s model privileges the afterlife of child sexuality in adult analysands, and because Deleuze and Guattari object to it so stri-dently, the history of child analysis after Little Hans is important here.

The fi rst practising child psychoanalyst seems to have been Hermine Hug-Helmuth. Hug-Helmuth fi rst theorised play therapy, although this idea has been (mis)attributed to Melanie Klein and Anna Freud (Geissman-Chambon and Geissman 1998: 43). Both Hug-Helmuth’s and Klein’s theories draw on elements of Freud’s work, including his observation of a child’s game he called ‘fort-da’ and used to exemplify a theory of ego development. But they foreground engagements between children and psychoanalytic theory which Freud’s work generally just presumes.

In ‘On the Technique of Child-Analysis’, Hug-Helmuth refers to a

‘little Hans’ who may not be Herbert Graf but certainly invokes Freud’s study. Her ‘play-therapy’ involves treating children by using anecdotes about other children and she diagnoses Hans with ‘death-wishes’

toward his father based on his responses to stories she narrates for him (Hug-Helmuth 1921: 295). She also directly links this diagnosis to Freud’s Little Hans:

In the case of phobia in a fi ve year old boy, Freud has shown us the method (and this has become the basis of psycho-analytic child-therapy) by which

we can throw light on these psychic depths in a small child where the libidi-nous stirrings change into childish anxiety. (Hug-Helmuth 1921: 288) In ‘The Development of a Child’ – a study of little Fritz, the son of her friends – Klein similarly asserts that ‘In his analysis of little Hans, Freud as in everything else has shown us the way’ (Klein 1923: 444). Klein also advocates play-therapy as a means to resolve Fritz’s issues with sexual-ity, and in particular his obsession with his ‘wiwi’. According to Klein, Fritz was also shy and socially underdeveloped, but improved with her intervention, which centred on responding honestly to any question he asked.

A rich set of internal references to Freud’s case studies appear in texts referring to child sexuality at this time, even if they were not analysing children. Rather than seeing these similarities as verifying particular truths it is worth seeing in them dynamics of infl uence and exchange.

In this crucial period of its popularisation psychoanalysis was already widely criticised for the relationship it posed between children and sex.

Oskar Pfi ster and Frederick M. Smith discuss this critique of Freud, asserting most signifi cantly that psychoanalysis made children out of adults fi rst:

one was led to occurrences or even mere fantasies which are connected with the earliest childhood up to the age of perhaps four years. In no adult were these infantile roots lacking. Thus even the study of the adult became child study. (Pfi ster and Smith 1915: 131)

Only then, they suggest, was the method applied to children themselves.

It is just this template derived from adult perspectives that Deleuze and Guattari decry in ‘The Interpretation of Utterances’: ‘It is impossible to produce an utterance without it being projected onto a ready-made and an already coded grid of interpretation. The child cannot get out of it’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1978: 141). They charge that the psychoana-lyst represses the child as well as depoliticising and desocialising them;

inventing, moreover, a model in which, normatively, ‘desire represses itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1978: 148).

From this brief slice of psychoanalytic history we can see how the analysis of children grounds the fundamental concepts of psychoanaly-sis but slips in and out of its theory and practice. In this early phase of psychoanalysis a story about child sexuality worked to verify the truth of its model, which is one of the reasons psychoanalysis works so well to support Foucault’s argument about modern sexuality. As the repressed prehistory of adult subjectivity, child sexuality was an unassailable fact.

As the correspondence between Carl Jung and Freud demonstrates, while the Oedipal crisis was central to psychoanalytic subjectivity, and thought to have been negotiated into more or less successful repression between the ages of two and fi ve, Freud himself avoided the direct analy-sis of children, even speculating that it was a matter better dealt with by women.