473

hysterical neuroses, for we are not yet prepared for the presupposi-
tions of symptom formation in the compulsive neuroses, paranoia,
and other neuroses.

IV

Our first consideration will be that of infantile hysterical animal
fear; for example, the typical case of horse fear of the five year old
“Little Hans” (in Volume VIII of my collected papers published in
German). Even the first glimpse allows us to recognize that the
relations of a genuine case of neurotic disease are much more compli-
cated than would be anticipated in our imagination as long as we
work with abstractions. Some work must be devoted to orientation–
which suppressed prompting, what symptom equivalent, what motive
for suppression becomes recognizable.

The boy refused to go out in the street because of his fear of
horses. This is the raw material. What is the symptom? Develop-
ment of anxiety, selection of a feared object, renunciation of free
mobility, or several such in combination? What gratification is
given up? Why must he go without it? The case is not enigmatical.
The incomprehensible fear of the horse is a symptom of incapacity
for walking in the street, a phenomenon of inhibition, a limitation
which is enjoined on the ego in order not to awaken the fear symp-
tom. One sees straightway the correctness of the explanation of the
last point and will leave this inhibition out of consideration in further
discussion. But the first fugacious acquaintance with the case does
not teach us to recognize the actual expression of the suppositious
symptoms. As shown by further inquiry it had to do not with an
indefinite fear of a horse, but a definite anxious expectation that the
horse would bite him. It is true that this content sought to withdraw
itself from consciousness and to replace it with an indefinite phobia
in which only the fear and the object remain. Is this content the
nucleus of the symptom?

We get no further so long as we do not draw the entire psychic
situation of the child into consideration as is revealed with analytical
work in general. In the Oedipus situation to the father we find
jealousy and enmity although the boy loved him heartily aside from
conditions in which the mother came into consideration. In
other words there was an ambivalence conflict–well founded love
with not less justified hate, both directed against the same person.
His phobia must result from an effort to solve this conflict. Such
ambivalence conflicts are very common and we know another typical
ending. In this one of the two instincts which strive together,

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usually the tender one, greatly strengthened, causes the other to
disappear. Only the excess and the compulsive character of the
tenderness betray it, as this situation is not the only one present,
and it is constantly on its guard to hold its opponent in subjugation
and allows us to construe a procedure which we describe as repres-
sion through reaction formation in the ego. Cases like that of little
Hans show nothing of such reaction formation; evidently there are
different ways which lead out of an ambivalence conflict.

In the meantime we have learned something with certainty. The
instinct stimulus which lies beneath the repression is a hostile
impulse against the father. The analysis gives us the proofs, because
it traces the origin of the idea of the biting horse. Hans had seen a
horse fall, and had also seen a playmate fall and hurt himself when
they were playing horse. This gave us the right to construe a wish
impulse of Hans’s which meant that the father might fall and
injure himself. References to an observed departure allowed us to
assume that the wish for the removal of the father had found a less
timid expression. Such a wish, however, is equivalent to the inten-
tion to remove him himself, with the murderous stimulus of the
Oedipus complex.

From this repressed instinct stimulus there leads up to now no
way to a substitute for what we suppose to be hippophobia. Suppose
we simplify the situation of the boy by clearing away the infantile
factor and ambivalence. There is, perhaps, a young man servant
who is enamored of the mistress and who rejoices in certain kind-
nesses on that account on her part. Suppose that he hates the
stronger master of the house and would like to have him removed.
The most natural consequence of this situation would be that he
fears the revenge of the master, so that there develops a sense of
fear–quite analogous to the phobia of the little boy for the horse.
That is to say, we cannot designate the fear in this phobia as symp-
tom; if the boy who loves his mother would show fear of his father
we should have no right to impute to him a neurosis, a phobia. We
have here a quite comprehensible affective reaction. That which
would make a neurosis out of this is another trait and this only, the
substitution of the horse for the father. This displacement produces
something which has claim to the name of symptom. It is that
other mechanism which permits the solution of the ambivalence
conflict without the aid of a reaction formation. It is made possible
or easier through the circumstance that the inborn traces of totem-
istic modes of thinking in this tender age are still readily animated.
The cleft between human and animal is not yet recognized, certainly
less emphasized than later. The adult, admired yet feared, still

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stands in a series with the larger animal, which man envies in many
ways and of which he must be warned because the beast can be a
source of danger. The ambivalence conflict is not decided on the
same person but is as if circumvented, as one palms off one of his
own promptings as that of a substitute man. Thus far we see clearly,
but in another point analysis of the phobia of the boy has brought a
complete disillusionment. The disguise in which the symptom forma-
tion exists is not at all undertaken as the representative (ideational
content) of the instinct prompting to be repressed, but is quite
different therefrom, which corresponds only to a reaction on the
essentially unpleasant. Our anticipation would find a gratification
sooner if the small Hans had developed in place of a phobia an in-
clination to mistreat the horse, to beat it, or had announced the wish
to see it fall and hurt itself, perhaps to die in convulsions (making a
riot with its legs). Something of the sort did develop during the
analysis but it did not stand long prominent in the neurosis. Some-
thing there is not in order, either in our comprehension of the re-
pression or in our definition of a symptom. One thing strikes us
naturally at once: if little Hans had really shown this demeanor
toward the horse, the character of the shocking, aggressive instinct
stimulus would not be at all altered by the repression; only the object
would be changed.

It is quite certain that there are cases of repression which do not
perform more than this; but in the genesis of the phobia in little Hans
more happened. As to how much more may be divined in another
fragment of the analysis.

We have already heard that little Hans gave as the content of his
phobia the idea of being bitten by the horse. Later we have had a
glimpse into the genesis of another case^* of animal phobia in which
a wolf was the animal feared with likewise the significance of a
father substitute. At the conclusion of a dream which made the
analysis transparent there developed in this boy the fear of being
devoured by a wolf like one of the seven kids in the fable. That the
father of little Hans demonstrably had played horse with him had
certainly been a determinant for the choice of the animal to be
feared. Likewise, it was at least made probable that the father of my
Russian (who was not analyzed until the third decade of his life)
had also in play imitated a wolf and jokingly threatened to eat the
boy. Since then I have found a third case in a young American in
whom indeed no zoöphobia had developed but this very omission aids

^*See History of an Infantile Neurosis (Vol. VIII of Collected Papers
in German).

476

in clearing up the other cases. His sexual excitation had been
kindled by a child’s fanciful history which was read to him, about an
Arabian chief who pursued a man consisting of an edible substance
(the gingerbread man) in order to devour him. He identified him-
self with this edible man while the chieftain was readily recogniz-
able as a substitute for the father and this fancy was the first substratum
of his autoerotic activity. The idea of being devoured by his father
is typical archaic child property; the analogies from mythology
(Chronos) and from animal life are well known.

Despite these explanations the content of this idea is so strange to
us that we could impute it to the child only with incredulity. We
do not even know whether he really meant what he seemed to be say-
ing and do no understand how he can be the subject of a phobia.
Analytic experience, however, gives the requisite information and
teaches us that the notion of being eaten by the father is the regres-
sive degraded expression of a passive tender excitation which wishes
to be loved by the father as an object in the sense of genital eroti-
cism. The follow-up history of the case leaves no doubt as to the
correctness of this interpretation. The genital striving does indeed
betray nothing more of its tender intention if expressed in the speech
of the vanquished transition phase of the oral to the sadistic libido
organization. Does it have to do further with nothing more than a
substitution of the representative through a regressive expression,
or is there a genuine regressive degradation of the genitally directed
striving in the It? It is not so easy to decide. The clinical history
of the Russian wolf man speaks quite decidedly for the last named
possibility for he himself behaved badly after the deciding dream–
vexatiously and sadistically–and soon after developed a proper com-
pulsion neurosis. In any case we gain the insight that the suppres-
sion is not the sole means which stands at the command of the ego
for the rejection of an unpleasant impulse prompting. When he
succeeds in bringing the impulse to regression he has injured it
fundamentally with greater energy than was possible through its
repression. Indeed, it often happens that the regression originally
forced follows the repression.

The subject matter with the wolf man, and that somewhat simpler
in the case of little Hans incite various other considerations but
already we gain two unexpected glimpses. There is no doubt that
in these phobias the repressed instinct is hostile to the father. One
may say this was repressed through the process of transformation into
the opposite; in place of aggression toward the father, the aggres-
sion–revenge–of the father is directed toward one’s own person.

477

As without this, such an aggression is rooted in the sadistic libido
phase, it needs only to be degraded to the oral stage, indicated by
Hans through the fear of being bitten, in the Russian carried out
crudely by the fear of being devoured. Moreover the analysis
established beyond all doubt that at the same time another instinct
yielded to repression, the opposite of a tender passive excitation
for the father, which had already reached the level of the genital
(phallic) libido organization. The latter indeed seems more impor-
tant for the end result of the process of repression. It experiences
a further reaching regression and maintains the determining influ-
ence on the content of the phobia. Where we have investigated
only a repression of impulse, we must recognize the coincidence
of two such processes; both of the promptings–sadistic aggression
against the father and a tender passive situation to him–form a con-
trasting pair. Still more: when we properly evaluate the history of
little Hans we recognize that through the formation of his phobia the
tender object-investment of the mother is also abolished, the con-
tent of phobia betraying nothing of this. In the case of Hans–it is
much less distinct in the Russian–there is only a process of repres-
sion, which concerns almost all of the components of the Oedipus
complex, the hostile as well as the tender incitation toward the father
and the tender incitation toward the mother.

These complications are not wished for by us who desire to study
only simple cases of symptom formation and with this intention we
have applied ourselves only to the earliest and apparently most
transparent neuroses of childhood. In place of a single repression
we found a cumulation of such and in addition had to do with a
regression. Perhaps we have increased the confusion when we treat
our two disposable cases of zoöphobia alike–that of little Hans
and the wolf man. Now certain differences occur to us. Only
in the case of little Hans can we say with precision that through
his phobia he disposed of both chief excitations of the Oedipus
complex, the aggressive attitude against the father and the over
tender one toward the mother; the tender feeling for the father is
certainly obvious and plays its rôle in the repression of its opposite,
but it is neither demonstrable that it was strong enough to provoke
the repression nor that it was afterwards abolished. Hans seems
to have been a normal child with a so-called positive Oedipus com-
plex. It is possible that the elements which we missed were also
coöperative but we could not point them out, the material even of
our most thorough analyses is defective and our documentation im-
perfect. In the Russian the defect is in another place; its relation
to the female object is disturbed by a precocious seduction; the pas-

478

sive, feminine side is strongly cultivated in him and the analysis of
the wolf dream reveals little of intentional aggression against the
father. Therefore the proofs are undoubted that the repression
concerns the passive, tender situation to the father. Here also other
factors may have actively participated, but such do not appear. If
despite this distinction in the two cases, which almost approximates
an antithesis, the end result of the phobia is almost the same, the
explanation must come to us from another side; it comes from the
second result of our little comparative study. We believe the motif
for repression in both cases is known and we see its rôle corrobo-
rated through the course which was taken by the development of
the two children. In both cases it is the same, the fear of threatened
castration. Out of castration fear little Hans gave up his aggression
toward the father; his fear that the horse would bite him can easily
be completed–the horse would bite off his genitals, castrate him.
But out of castration fear the little Russian renounced the wish
to be loved by the father as a sexual object, for he had understood
that such a relation had the presupposition that his genitals would
be sacrificed–the organs which distinguished him from woman.
Both forms of the Oedipus complex, the normal and active like the
inverted, are shattered at the castration complex. The fear idea
of the Russian, that of being devoured by the wolf, does not con-
tain any hint of castration; it had through oral regression removed
itself too far from the phallic phase, but the analysis of the dream
makes every other proof superfluous. It is a complete triumph of
suppression that in the text of the phobia there is no further hint
of castration.

Here we have unexpected results. In both cases the motif of
repression is the fear of castration; the content of the fear of
being bitten by the horse and of being devoured by the wolf are
substitutions, disguised, for the content of being castrated by the
father. In the Russian it was the expression of a wish which could
not exist if manhood were rebelled against; in Hans it was the
expression of a reaction which aggression transformed to the oppo-
site. But the fear affect of the phobia which makes up its nature,
does not originate in the process of repression, nor from the libidi-
nous fixations of the suppressed impulses but from that which is
repressed. The fear in the zoöphobia is the untransformed castra-
tion fear, hence a true fear, fear of an actually threatened or actually
judged danger. Here the fear makes the repression, not, as I once
thought, the reverse.

It is not pleasant to think thus but it does not help to deny it.
I have often represented the proposition that through repression

479

the representative of the impulse is disguised, displaced, etc., the
libido of the prompting being transformed into fear. Investigation
of the phobias which before all should be called on to prove this
proposition, not only did not confirm but seemed rather to contra-
dict directly. The fear of the zoöphobias is the castration fear of
the ego, that of the less fundamentally studied agoraphobia seems to
be fear of temptation, which must cohere genetically with castration
fear. Most phobias as far as we can see to-day go back to fear
of the ego of the claims of the It. Here the fear situation of the
ego is the primary one and the incentive to repression. The fear
never comes forth from the libido. If I formerly pleased to say,
after the repression appears a mass of fear in place of the expected
expression of the libido, I have nothing to take back to-day. The
description is correct and between the force of the prompting to
be repressed and the intensity of the resulting fear the correspond-
ence which I asserted doubtless exists. But I confess that I believe
I gave more than a mere description, in assuming that I had recog-
nized the metapsychological process of a direct transformation of
the libido into fear. This I cannot to-day maintain. Nor was I
formerly able to explain how this came to pass.

Whence did I draw the idea of this transformation? At a time
when it was still not possible for us to distinguish between processes of
the ego and processes of the It–from the study of actual neuroses–
I found that definite sexual practices such as coitus interruptus,
frustrated excitation, enforced abstinence, generated outbreaks of
fear and a general predisposition to fears–always therefore when
the course of sexual gratification was inhibited, delayed or diverted.
As sexual excitement is the expression of libidinous promptings it
does not seem venturesome to assume that libido is changed to fear
through the influence of such disturbances. Now this observation
holds good to-day. On the other hand it cannot be denied that the
libido of the It processes experiences a disturbance through the
incitement of the repression; it may be still better to say that fear
arises in the repression from the libido investment of the instinct
stimulus. But how may we harmonize this result with the other,
that the fear of the phobias is an ego fear–originating in the ego,
not produced by repression but producing the repression? This
seems a contradiction and is not readily solved. The reduction of
both origins of fear to one single fear is not readily carried through.
One may try it with the assumption that the ego in the situation of
the disturbed coitus, the interrupted excitement, the abstinence,
scents danger, to which it reacts with fear. But nothing can be done

480

with this. On the other hand the analysis of the phobias which we
have undertaken seems not to admit of a justification. It is not clear.

V

We will study the symptom formation and the secondary combat
of the ego against the symptom but we have frankly made no for-
tunate selection among the phobias. The fear which dominates in
the picture of this affection appears to us now as a complication which
veils the subject matter. There are neuroses in abundance in which
no fear is shown. The genuine conversion hysteria is of this sort,
and its severest symptoms are found with no admixture of fear.
This fact must warn us that we must not adhere too closely to the
relations between fear and symptom formation. Otherwise con-
version hysteria stands so close to the phobias that I have held myself
justified in grouping the latter with “fear hysterias.” But no one
has as yet been able to give the condition which differentiates between
them or whether a case assumes the form of a conversion hysteria
or a phobia. Nor has any one explored the reasons for develop-
ment of fear in hysteria.

The commonest symptoms of conversion hysteria–a motor paraly-
sis, contracture, involuntary action or discharge, a pain, a hallucina-
tion–are either permanently established or intermittent investment
processes, the explanation of which prepares new difficulties. One
really knows but little of such symptoms. Through analysis one
may learn what disturbed course of excitement they replace. Mostly
it results that they themselves have a part in these, as if the total
energy had been concentrated on a fragment. Pain was present in
the situation in which the repression fell; hallucination was at the
time a perception; motor palsy was a defense against action which
should have been carried out in that situation but was inhibited;
contracture is usually a displacement for a muscular innervation
intended at the time at another place; the convulsive attack an expres-
sion of an affective outbreak which has withdrawn itself from the
normal control of the ego. Changeable in a striking manner is the
feeling of disinclination which accompanies the appearance of the
symptoms. In the permanent symptoms displaced as to motility, as
palsies and contractures, this is mostly absent; the ego behaves against
these as if non-participating. In the intermittent cases and in symp-
toms of the sensory sphere, these sensations of pain are as a rule
distinct and in the case of pain the symptoms may increase to
an excessive degree. It is very difficult in this manifoldness to find
the factor which makes such differences possible and which can