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. Furst), Freud deploys Hans (then Herbert) evidentially to support his thesis that ‘sexuality should be treated like anything else that is worth knowing about’ (1907a, 138). He argues that the attitude of mythmaking 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 (parents and educators) to respond in kind to the sapere aude spirit of the child. Freud is clear in his letter of 1907 that Hans and his fellow amateur sexual theorists (other children) are neither unusually sensual nor pathologically disposed, rather their spirit of enquiry is the natural stance of the un-intimidated 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 (133). 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’ (1908, 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’ sexual curiosity (1909, 9). Describing Hans’ 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 ‘spirit of enquiry’ (9).
Freud was to reiterate the ambiguity of this position in a passage added to his ‘Three Essays’ in 1915. Here, and in keeping with Blass’ argument noted above, Freud 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. (194, 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. Only once narcissism is set as the formative state from which modes of loving derive, can Freud reframe the question of Wissbegierde’s autonomy from the sexual instincts.
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’ (1907a, 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’ (1909, 9). We might say that Hans’ 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’ 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 more than closed self-investment. If we are prepared to read the investments of narcissism as always active in their environment (as per the argument of Chapter 1), we can see how it is precisely Hans’ researches — his attempts to acquire knowledge in order to consolidate his identity and to valorise himself — which expose him to his potential lack. Hans’ narcissism, then, is double-edged; his self-investments are self-imperilling, and it is on these grounds that Hans wins Freud’s commendation. As we shall come to see, it is Hans’ breakdown — his phobia and street anxiety — which paradoxically demonstrates his integrity as a narcissistic 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’ (1909, 11). This proposition, which is corroborated by his mother, acquires the status of a belief and 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’ 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’ 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:
[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! (1909, 11n)
With chastising wit, Freud is again demarcating the ground for analytic research in distinction to the researches of certain philosophers, children, or occultists who prefer the ‘dazzling brilliance of a flawless theory’ to the ‘fragmentary pieces of [analytic] knowledge’ (1941, 178). 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, as a science, psychoanalysis will have ‘only a few apodeictic propositions in its catechism’, and must find satisfaction in pursuing ‘approximations to certainty […] in spite of the absence of final confirmation’ (1916a, 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 (1908, 219).