Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old

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This important publication of 1909 was the first case study in which clinical material, derived directly from the treatment of a child, was presented as evidence in support of Sigmund Freud's theories of infantile sexuality. The somewhat unorthodox treatment was carried out by the child's father under the "supervision," mainly by way of letters, of Freud himself. This case study played a significant role for Freud in consolidating his new theories concerning infantile sexuality. While his major findings about the existence of the Oedipus and castration complexes, and the sexual life and theories of children, had originally been derived from the analysis of adults, the case of "Little Hans" (as it has come to be called in the psychoanalytic literature) provided the independent "proof" Freud needed, using clinical material obtained from a child. The case of Little Hans delivered compelling clinical examples which confirmed many of the theoretical statements made in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which Freud had published in 1905, and which were, at that time, regarded as scandalous. Little Hans, whose father had been sending Freud reports about his son's interest in sexual matters and his curiosity about his body and the bodies of others—an interest centered especially upon the anatomical differences between the sexes—suddenly developed a phobia (an infantile neurosis). He refused to leave the house and go into the street for fear of being bitten by a horse. The paper "The Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy" is the account of the development, the interpretation, the working through, and partial dissolution of the neurotic conflicts from which the phobic symptom originated. This first "child analysis" was conducted, with "supervision" from Freud, by Max Graf, Hans's father, an early follower of Freud's. His wife, Hans's mother, had been in
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