Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy

Freud's case history of "Little Hans", a five-year-old boy who developed a phobia of horses, published in 1909 in the first volume of the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen. Freud met the boy only once: the treatment was conducted by the boy's father, a follower of Freud, and the case is written up from his notes. Freud interprets the phobia as arising from the boy's Oedipal situation (his love for his mother, his hostility toward his father, his fear of castration and his curiosity about birth and the genitals) and argues that anxiety born of repressed longing was displaced onto horses, which stood for the father. As the first analysis of a child, the case is offered as direct confirmation of the theory of infantile sexuality Freud had set out in 1905.