Foreign Body Vol. 2

Hearing the Case - Freud's Little Hans (part 1)

David Punter

Welcome to a further session in the series known as Foreign Body. I am conscious of feeling pleased that the overarching name, the sign of these sessions, is Foreign Body; because among the many signifieds of that name, it seems to me, are discontinuity, a rejection of the linear and the master-narrative, a willingness to engage with fragments and dismemberments. I shall be returning, at least implicitly, to that theme later; but my immediate purpose in mentioning it is to do with the fact that the last presentation in this series was given by Nick Royle under the title The Remains of Psychoanalysis [versions of which were presented under this title at Stirling and Oxford, and published in After Derrida, MUP 1995]. It must already be clear from my title that I shall be talking today about psychoanalysis, and it might not perhaps be very comfortable to be doing so in the aftermath of a presentation which, for all I know, may have effectively buried analysis, and Freud with it, and sealed their remains into a crypt.

I say for all I know because I was unable to attend Nick's presentation - indeed, my inability to be here on that night was a factor in its timing - and thus I can only talk about it by hearsay - and hearsay again is a topic to which I shall be returning because hearsay is, in more than one sense, the mode of psychoanalysis; or perhaps it is the always potentially untruthful ghost of all discourse.

Hearsay; hearing the case; none of this is entirely true either because I have had an opportunity to read Nick's presentation, a copy of which I received yesterday; but I have not taken up that opportunity, no doubt out of a complex of fears, so such connections as we may be able to establish between these two discrete parts of a discursive body will be for you to discern.

But that may not be possible either; because when I last talked to Nick on the telephone - and telephones have also been haunting Foreign Body - he said that the audience, the hearers, today would not be the same as those last time. I cannot know whether that is literally true; but of course it is true anyway that not two acts of hearing, especially of multiple hearing, can replicate each other.

Hearing the case: I want to expand a little on the trope in my title. Hearing is also, always, pre-hearing; hearing in psyche, hearing in advance, a pre-existent ensemble of voices, so that for example in preparing this presentation I have also been hearing voices, replications of the voices of some of those of you here, other less assignable voices, voices of approbation, criticism, protest. Hearing and the "remains" of psychoanalysis: can we hear the remains; do the dead speak; what voices can we hear in the analytic process? Hearing and the symptom: analysis is, among many other things, that process wherein one hears the symptom, where the symptom speaks its own name, from another place, with its own authority, but of course in the writings of analysis what we get is hearsay, the unauthenticated, perhaps the forever inauthentic.

What could make an account of psychoanalysis authentic, what could induce you to hear voices which are trustworthy, what can we make of events, auditory hallucinations no doubt , which go on in the enclosed room from which a third is excluded, how many voices speak within the analytic session, to what hearer do we address ourselves on the couch? A stab at authentication: I am in analysis myself, and have been for a year and a half. When I went into analysis, it seemed to me necessary to gather about myself the protective armour of a presenting symptom: that symptom was my inability to remember my father, who died when I was eight; my inability, if you like, any longer to hear him, or rather to recognise his voice. Obviously my body gave up the attempt some years after his death, because when I was twenty-one, which at that time, in this culture, was the age of attaining majority, the age at which the male is confronted with the dream, the nightmare, of following in father's footsteps, half of my hearing closed down, I became deaf in my left ear. Sinister, you might say; fears of an illegitimate birth, common to us all because the father, until recently, has been the parent who can prove nothing; paternity is historically a matter of hearsay, of long-distance and faulty communication. My father, for what it is worth, was a radio operator.

But if one is to hear, the same tale must be told; and so I shall have to try to tell the tale of Little Hans; from hearsay. Once upon a time, Little Hans was born: in 1903. His father was an adherent of Freud's; a man interested in the novel science of psychoanalysis. At the time Freud was asking his adherents, his contacts and acquaintances, to gather information on the sexual life of young children. As Freud put it, he had already been gathering evidence from his adult patients and this evidence seemed to him to point in certain directions, to suggest certain assertions one might be able to make about early sexual life, life before latency; what better method to demonstrate the truth of these assertions than by learning - by hearing - about that life at first-hand? No, that will not do; at second-hand, at third-hand, the chains of hearing and textuality, correspondence and hearsay, spin out impossibly.

Little Hans' s father took it upon himself to communicate such information about his son's sexual interests as he could; there seems little doubt that he expected that this would provide a model of an undisturbed, successful childhood, for he regarded himself and his wife as good parents, sexually enlightened and analytically aware. But when Hans was four and three-quarters something disturbing occurs, about which his father writes to Freud in the following terms:

My dear Professor, I am sending you a little more about Hans - but this time, I am sorry to say, material for a case history. As you will see, during the last few days he has developed a nervous disorder, which has made my wife and me most uneasy, because we have not been able to find any means of dissipating it. I shall venture to call upon you tomorrow... but in the meantime ... I enclose a written record of the material available.

There are interesting ellipses in that paragraph, but we shall return to the discursive complexities of the text in a moment. In the meantime, what was this disorder? I can only tell you - you can only hear from me - one version of it, one redaction: Little Hans, his father, Freud, now myself - a lineage of males hearing or professing to hear males, of course. Let me put it this way. Little Hans developed a phobia. His phobia, like all phobias, was complex, it evolved over time, the tales - or legends, as it might be better to call them - Hans could tell about it varied from time to time; but we must find a path trough the swamp. Let us say that it had to do with horses; it has to do with loading and motion; it had to with staying indoors; it had to with shit, which Hans calls "lumf"; it had to do with mother, father, and the recent birth of a baby sister, Hanna, to Little Hans.

Hans found himself unable to go outdoors. He related his fear, under questioning from his parents, to fear of horses. It seems as though at some points he was afraid that a horse might bite him. At other times he was afraid that a horse might fall down, that if it did so it would make a row with its legs" in a way which would frithten him. These fears attached themselves particularly to heavy horses, dray horses; outside Hans's front door and across a busy street - we learn this from several diagrams incorporated into the text, which are presumably distillations of hearings - was a Customs House which was visited by horses and carts all day long. Hans was also frightened by various features of horses'faces: by things which, he said, they wore in front of their eyes, by black around their mouths"; it took Freud, the professor who was good at hearing, only a moment to interpret these as the spectacles and moustache of his father, but much displacement remained to be unravelled.

The heaviness of the loading, for example, becomes interpretable as the analysis - if it is an analysis - proceeds in terms of bodily motions, movements, displaced anxieties about shitting, once a pleasurable activity for Hans but now very recently repressed into anxiety by a sequence of events. It has also to do, we hear, with pregnancy, with the knowledge - illicit knowledge from which his enlightened parents nevertheless thought they had protected Hans - of his mother's pregnancy with his sister Hanna and his incommunicable understanding of the connections between shitting, giving birth, dropping a load, lying on one's back... and so on. It has to do with Hans's impatience with the pack of lies he has been told about storks, so that the carts become his already ironic equivalent fort the birth process, the carriers which conceal their own contents,the womb and its opening of which he is not supposed to know. The gates of the Customs House were clearly orifices of the body for Hans, and he was scared and fascinated by them.

What else can we say about Little Hans, what else do I want you to hear? I should like you to hear his voice, his pain and confusion, his occasional triumphs or feeling and understanding, but we cannot hear that, not any more. We do not really know whether his father could. I should like you to hear about Hans's early experiences of playing "horsey" with his father, and subsequently with his friends; but this would be to bring an animal voice to life, and this we cannot do either.

Towards the end of the text Freud also asks what it might have been that Little Hans had heard, what it was which he recollected - or reconstructed - when he saw the fallen horse, on its back, drumming its legs; parental intercourse, Freud wonders, but then he closes down this line of enquiry as insoluble. Some things cannot be heard; what is on record is that Freud only heard Hans in an analytic situation once, and then only in diluted form for on that occasion a third was present. Hans's father who, Freud tells us, opened the session by presenting the "facts" as he then saw them.

What kind of a story is that? Little Hans had a phobia; he was cured of it; he was cured in the proper way, according to Freud, because the singular good fortune of having a father interested in analysis meant that he could talk about his experiences, about his imaginings, that he could be heard and thus was enabled to proceed towards maturity unencumbered with certain repressions which would otherwise have become sedimented, unshiftable. But what kind of a story, I ask again, is that? Well, it is a story distilled from a text, this text - which is of course itself a translation, but also demonstrates many more complexities than that. The text, this text, is divided into four unequal parts. The first three were written in 1909: Part One is titled Introduction, Part Two Case History and Analysis , Part Three Discussion. The fourth Part, titled Postscript, was added in 1922.

Part One consists of a brief series of statements about Freud's purposes in recounting the tale - these are interestingly varied,and bear as much on Freud's wish for us to hear a vindication of certain aspects of his theories of infant sexuality as on the nature of Hans's childhood. Where, however, they come to bear on the latter it is through detail of the father's communications about Hans during the period which we might want to designate as pre-phobic. It contains some interesting information about Hans's interest in his genitals, and about his mother's similar interest in Hans's genitals - including her famous comment, which occurs on the third page of this 136-page case, to the effect that if Little Hans continues to put his hand on his penis she will send for Dr A to cut it off. I am not aware that research has demonstrated the identity of Dr A; but I think we all know him well, at least the little boys in us do, from the nursery. Part Two, which opens with the father's communication of disturbance which I have quoted above, recounts two histories, which Freud takes care to differentiate: the history of Hans's phobia, and the history of Hans's analysis - although we might fairly want to ask who is the "possessor" of this analysis - the two accounts culminating in a resolution which is said to be mutually satisfactory, although quite who the parties are of this mutual satisfaction remains, we might perhaps say, not clear. This occupies the bulk of the text. The oddly-named Part Three, titled Discussion although it is notable less multivocal than its predecessor, offers us Freud's thoughts on the issues raised by the phobia and by its analysis. It also contains a supremely important couple of sentences which describe Freud's interest in the case, which I shall for the moment quote without gloss: I have for some time been thinking with pain of the way in which the adherents of the normal person will fall upon poor little Hans {like heavy horses?} as soon as they are told that he can in fact be shown to have had a hereditary taint. His beautiful mother fell ill with a neurosis as a result of a conflict during her girlhood. I was able to be of assistance to her at the time, and this had in fact been the beginning of my connection with Hans's parents.

I can hardly bear to leave aside the extraordinary implications of these sentences; but I assure you I will come back to them later. In the meantime we must turn to the fourth Part, the Postscript, and it is here that we can begin to raise some questions: questions about impossibility; questions about ending; questions about what knowledge we have, or perhaps we might better say what knowledge possesses us, when we are hearing the case. The Postscript tells us that in 1922 a young man came to Freud and told him that he was Little Hans; he was now 19 (I suppose Freud heard him saying that). Freud is pleased: he describes this apparition, this ghost of the past - whom he accepts as Hans, after all, only by hearsay - as a strapping youth, asserts that he is evidently cured and healthy despite the later divorce of his partens; but adds two further comments, one of which is evidently disturbing to him, Freud, the other of which effects, it seems to me, a radical disturbance in the text itself.

First, he says that Hans has read his published case history - he does not explain how or why this came into his hands - and that to him, Hans, the whole of it came as something unknown; he did not recognise himself; he could remember nothing. So, Freud says, somewhat elegiacally, the analysis has not preserved the events from amnesia, but had been overtaken by amnesia itself. There is a technical problem here, about whether we are discussing intensified and further entwined repression or a healthful dismissal of the past, but that is a clinical matter; we are, after all, foreign bodies and I am more concerned with the textual crux here, because it suggests the death of a certain facility of hearing, the outgrowing of a sensory apparatus, such that listening in one's childhood may in fact become impossible under certain conditions (excepts perhaps over the telephone). I am tempted to say that these conditions may be defined in terms of certain types of over-attention,an excess of presence, a drowning of and in voices; but I cannot prove that, and in any case am now veering into my own analysis.

Of more general interest, it seems to me, are Freud's final sentences, where he compares Hans's apparent amnesia with what he asserts to be common experience in the following way:

Any one who is familiar with psychoanalysis may occasionally experience something similar in sleep. He will be woken up by dream, and will decide to analyse it then and there; he will then go to sleep again feeling quite satisfied with the results of his efforts; and next morning dream and analysis will alike be forgotten.

In order to let the implications of this sentence sink in one should read it again. Do I need to spell out the uncanny impossibility of what Freud is saying? If we wake up having forgotten the entire dream/analysis episode, then how can we know that anything of the sort has taken place? And if we do have some curious intimation of such a structure, how can we refer any part of it to the realm of the wakeful rather than the realm of dream itself?

Impossibility of recall, impossibility of rehearing; it is significant that this textual and analytic crux occurs in the last sentences of the text and undercuts all the rest. But there are other impossibles and unnameables in the text and in the case". Naming itself, for example, and renaming: Hans's name in the earliest redaction was not Hans at all but Herbert. Father and mother have no names, and neither does Freud within the body of the text, although otherwise names and especially pet-names abound. Father speaks on several occasions of recording on the spot exactly what his four-year-old son was saying; was he really? He tells us that he uses shorthand: do we speak to our children with a shorthand pad in our hands? And the final impossible: for we might say that no analysis happens in this case history at all, no interpretation; for there is no pure analytic situation to be encountered.

Never mind: the text is a structure of impossibilities. So are all texts. Let us return to something easier to grasp,. the question of hearing, which must fall apart into two elements: who hears whom, and who is not heard. First things first.

Who hears whom? Freud hears the father - they talk together - and reckons on being heard himself as a composite voice; on first publication the paper was not described as being "by" Freud but as being communicated by him, and later we learn that this was with the "express consent of little Hans's father". Yet even here there is a question: on the second page of the case Freud tells us that he will now proceed to reproduce his father's records of little Hans just as I received them" yet the very first words which succeed this are Freud's own, and as the second Part of the text in particular progresses it becomes increasingly difficult to hear a single voice in the cacophony which confronts us - and which, of course - surrounded Little Hans.

The treat of castration which I have already mentioned is, interestingly, reported by Freud "as mentioned by the parents themselves" - an early example of the apparent presence of the mother in this male account, and one to which I shall return, although the mind boggles at the elision which can have Freud thus commenting if the only evidence is that which we have, which is clearly from the father; in what precise terms - and with what tonality - did Hans's mother report her comment to her husband? And then, what does Freud hear of himself? Two quotations, only two pages apart, on the subject of infant analysis: it is not in the least our business to understand a case at once: this is only possible at a later stage; and then, no moment of time is so favourable for the understanding of a case as its initial stages. Awestruck hearing, we might say; not hearing ourselves; drowning in voices. What Hans presumably hears, of course, is the outcome of one of Freud's major instructions to his parents, which is that he, Hans, should be subjected to a gradual process of sexual enlightenment; one of the elements in this strategy, since Hans has shown an apparently unusual interest in his mother's "widdler", as he calls it, is that he should be informed that his mother and all other female beings (as he could see from Hanna) had no widdler at all.

Freud, as we have already heard, hears Hans only once; his parents hear him a great deal of the time, as for example on the occasion when, as we learn, his mother examined him "all morning". But then, perhaps the more important question here is the second one: who, or what, is not being heard? What hearing is not possible - not possible particularly, perhaps, if we are to try a case? The father, still in the letter in which he reports Hans' s disturbance, mentions in an almost offhand way that no doubt the ground {for Hans's phobia} was prepared by sexual over-excitation due to his mother's tenderness; whatever else we may think of this remark it obviously sets the scene for the mother as a suppressed correspondent in these processes of responsive hearing. It is her castratrion threat which has been reported, whithout corroboration, as heard; with her we are always in the realm of hearsay; with hearsay, I suspect, we are always in the realm of the mother.

But then Hans himself, as we might expect, is heard in a peculiar way. For example there are many occasions on which we are told that he speaks of his phobia as this "nonsense of mine"; on one occasion his father, reporting such a comment, adds apologetically that that is how he speaks of his phobia. What is remarkable here is that we are also told that Freud and Hans's father have themseves agreed that this is the phrase which should be supplied to Hans as a way of talking about things; in hearing this phrase they are hearing, or mishearing, themselves and failing to recognise their own voices. Hans, of course, knows that he cannot be heard; during one of his lengthy conversations with his father (recorded, presumably, by the father himself, notebook in hand), Hans says "You don't believe me again?" and at another moment "I'm not joking, you know, Daddy".

What are we to make of such moments? How can we imagine the facial expressions, the suppressed elements, of dialogue, the ellipses which occasioned these comments, these desperate requests for a serious hearing, for the case to be properly tried without allowance always being made for assumed silences, misprisions, assumptions, arrogances? What are we to make of the moment when Hans, apparently hopelessly confused in his attempts,. at the age of four, to describe the processes of birth and to signify his continued but doubtful adherence to the narrative of the stork, says "I heard so -or didn't I hear it at all? or did I say wrong?"

There are many, many other examples: perhaps they are best summarised by Freud himself in his so-called Discussion, when he describes the interpretative technique as presenting the unconscious complex to {the patient's} consciousness "in our own words". Who here is the our", or rather the we"? Is it inclusive, does it permit the patient at least some participation in the process of hearing, or is it a statement on behalf of "the enlightened",the loose professionality which, in this case, also includes the father who is so much disturbed by the notion of the son as case history, the case history as son, but decisively excludes the patient himself; and also excludes an intriguing panoply of others, to whom we must now turn.

There is a continuing trope Freud uses in this case history and in others, which is to do with "clearing up". Now that the matter had been "cleared up", for example, Hans's father attempted to examine the boy a second time upon "this important point"; or I say no more than that it is possible, because the matter was "not cleared up in the analysis". On the other hand it is evident that this legend of clearing up relates to a collusive activity of Freud and Hans's father; this is made strikingly clear in a phrase used near the beginning of the analysis, connected to a sexual dream of Hans's, when Freud notes that "his father's penetration...succeeded in clearing it up".

part two...

out...