- Alfie Bown
- May 11
- 5 min read
Reading Little Hans: A New Podcast Series
By Kate Merritt and Manuel Gabbert
Everyday Analysis is delighted to announce that we are hosting a new podcast series, hosted by Kate Merritt and Manuel Gabbert. It starts with a 5-part exploration into one of Freud's most significant case studies: the fascinating case of Little Hans.
Back in 19xx, little Hans no longer wants to leave the house as he is afraid a horse will bite him. Freud concludes that little Hans is fond of his mother and wants to replace his father. But is there more to his phobia? Kate and Manuel read the little Hans case through the lens of Lacan and his 4th seminar on the Object Relation. We will learn that, in working through the castration complex, Hans is struggling with the lack in the Other and to find an opening for himself in it.
In this 5-part series, Kate and Manuel discuss Freud's famous case of Little Hans and his neuroticisms and perversions. It is a guide for students, a casual and expert analysis and a fascinating read through one of the most important texts in the history of psychoanalysis.
Episode One
Episode Two
Hans’ father had been corresponding with Freud for about a year before Hans' phobia emerged. This was part of Freud’s broader call for observational material on children to support his theories of infantile sexuality. Hans was very interested in “widdlers”, and enjoyed pointing them out at the zoo, humorously asking to draw a widdler on a giraffe that his father had sketched. Hans used widdlers to distinguish animate vs. inanimate beings, but he struggled to distinguish between men and women. He was particularly curious whether his mother had a widdler – a question Freud interpreted as evidence of castration anxiety and Oedipal desire. Lacan used this question to explore the concept of the maternal phallus and how children enter the symbolic realm through language, exchange, and desire.
Hans was a joyful little boy, but shortly before his fifth birthday, a phobia of horses emerged; Hans is afraid to go into the street without his mother, and this fear crystallizes into a fear of being bitten by a horse.
Several significant events occur around the time Hans' phobia:
Hans masturbates at night, which his mother discouraged. Freud suggests this attempt at suppression rather than satisfaction may contribute to anxiety.
Hans asks his mother if she has a widdler. Realising his mother may not, he may conclude that castration has occurred.
The birth of his baby sister Hanna. Hans laughed when Hanna was in the bath, remarking on her “lovely widdler” (though she clearly didn’t have one).
These moments represents a confrontation with sexual difference. However, Hans interpreted the absence in Hanna as temporary, believing it might grow later—similar to teeth. In the episode we debate whether this is an age-appropriate belief in future growth or a defensive disavowal to avoid confronting sexual difference? Since no one explicitly told Hans that girls don’t have penises, his interpretations remain exploratory rather than outright denial.
In the episode, we discuss Hans’ dreams of giraffes and their symbolic significance. Freud interpreted the giraffes as representations of oedipal rivalry, while Lacan saw them representing a movement from the imaginary to the symbolic. Alternatively, we consider whether the widdler is simply a narrative McGuffin—a seemingly meaningless yet essential object driving the narrative forward. In order for something to become a symbol (and circulate), must it be lost, stolen or exchanged? Hans predicament highlights the psychoanalytic transition into the social world that we all, inevitably, must pass through.
Episode Three
Episode 3 continues the exploration of Little Hans and how he finds his own path out of the Oedipal complex. At this point in the text, Hans meets Freud for the first time. Lacan proposes that Freud, in this moment, functions as Hans’s imaginary father—the all-seeing, all-knowing figure. Freud prophetically tells Hans that he always knew that one day a Little Hans would come to see him. After their meeting, Hans asks his father "Does the professor talk to God?", confirming Freuds omniscient role. This role offers Hans some temporary relief from his phobia, but the insertion of the imaginary father is not sufficient to keep his symptoms away for long.
Freud suggests that Hans’s biological father assumes the role of the castrating figure, the symbolic father that threatens access to the mother, whereas Lacan argues that the father actually lacks authority. In Lacan’s view, Hans’s symptoms are in fact demanding a symbolic prohibition from his father to free him from the closed circuit of the mother. We question whether both Lacan and Freud overlook the father’s dialogical role. Even when misinterpreting Hans, the father's active engagement with Hans in conversation still contributes to a symbolic restructuring of Hans's world through language.
We discuss that Hans’s feelings toward his father are complex and are not as strictly fear-based as Freud believes. The father does, in some ways, offer Hans a way out, which Hans explores through fantasies of transgression: traveling with his father or smashing windows together. As Manuel laid out in a previous episode, transgression is inherent to the law, and new laws are what Hans needs.
The theme of traversing the circuit runs strongly throughout Hans dialogue. Whether it’s trespassing onto roped-off lawns, traveling with the father, or climbing onto the horse carts to reach the loading bay, Hans is actively navigating how to move beyond the maternal circuit and create a new symbolic order.
Hans is also afraid of a new thing, the black around the horses mouth and in front of their eyes. Presumably it is the black leather of the blinders and the muzzle that occupies Hans mind. When his mother buys new drawers he throws himself on the ground in disgust. When asked whether it is because the yellow of pants remind him of pee and shit, Hans claims that lumpf, his word for shit, isn't yellow, rather it is white or black. Immediately afterwards he asks whether it is easier to do lumpf if you have eaten cheese before.
We encounter here the first time that Hans makes a connection between eating and shitting. We interpret this as Hans trying to understand how a baby enters and exits the stomach. The question he's pondering is: where do babies come from?
Hans makes frequent use of oppositions; black and white, small and large, loaded and unloaded. We see Hans behaving more and more ambivalent towards his phobic objects, and we connect this to the ambivalence between Wishing and Anxiety. Wishing and Anxiety are not always mutually exclusive. One can wish for something that one is also anxious of and one can be anxious of something one wishes for. Hans is showing this ambivalence towards his differentiations, like looking and not looking or big and small.
We interpret this as Hans still grappling with an unsatisfactory concept that he applies both to the question of where do babies come from and to the notion of the feminine or maternal phallus—namely, the idea of growth: that things begin small and simply get bigger. His linking of eating and shitting marks an initial step toward a more dialectical approach to the question of where babies come from. We wonder about the meaning of blackness which Hans takes from the black cloth on the horses head and what he thinks about whiteness. We pick up this thread in the next episode.
Episode Four is coming soon...
