Getting ready to teach Freud’s case study of “Little Hans”, which describes the psychoanalytic treatment of a 5-year-old boy. Two gems worth sharing…
Little Hans on dicks:
The first trait in Little Hans which can be rearded as part of his sexual life was his quite peculiarly lively interest in his “widdler”… This interest aroused in him the spirit of enquiry, and he thus discovered that the presence or absence of a widdler made it possible to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects.
What a fucking awesome taxonomic process:
What kind of thing is this thing?
Hmm…
Step 1: Does it have a dick?
It was also kind of surreal to read Freud saying this:
It is a regrettable fact that no account of psychoanalysis can reproduce the impressions received by the analyst as he conducted it, and that a final sense of conviction can never be obtained from reading about it but only from directly experiencing it.
There it is, right there: the epitaph of psychodynamics as a mental science; the seeds of hegemony for cognitive-behavioral theorists; the tragedy of what must get ruled out when you’re Doing Science.
As fascinating as I find psychoanalysis, a science of case studies is no science at all. The gradual recognition of this fact is threatening to render it academically inanimate. For many years now, psychodynamic therapists have struggled with the very serious question: “Would Little Hans call our working theories dickless?”
