29

IV

Infantile Zoöphobia

THE first case which we shall consider is that of an in-
fantile hysterical zoöphobia, taking as an example a case,
typical in all essential respects, of a phobia of horses, the
case of “little Hans.” ¹ The very first impression we derive
makes it evident that the conditions which obtain in
an actual case of neurotic illness are far more complicated
than we should be led to expect as long as we work with
abstractions only. It is something of a task to get one’s
bearings with regard to what the repressed impulse is
and what its substitute in the form of symptoms, and
wherein the motive for repression becomes recognizable.

Little Hans refused to go out on the street because he
was afraid of horses. This is the raw material of the case.
Now, what is it in this which is the symptom: the develop-
ment of anxiety, or the choice of the object of anxiety,
or the renouncing of freedom of movement, or several
of these combined? What is the gratification which he
renounces? Why does he have to renounce it?

It would be easy enough to reply that there is nothing
so very puzzling about this case. The unintelligible fear
of horses is the symptom; the inability to go out on the
street is an inhibition, a restriction, which the ego im-
poses on itself in order not to arouse anxiety. The correct-
ness of the explanation of this last point is sufficiently

¹ See The Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, Collected
Papers, Vol. III.

30

evident, and this inhibition may therefore be left out of
account in our subsequent discussion. But this cursory
initial acquaintance with the case does not even give us
the true text of the manner in which the alleged symptom
is expressed. For, as we learn on closer inquiry, it is not
at all a question of an indefinite fear of horses, but of a
definite anxious expectation–namely, that of being bit-
ten by a horse. This content, it is true, seeks to avoid be-
coming conscious and to be replaced by the indefinite
phobia in which only the anxiety and its object still re-
main. Is this content perhaps the nucleus of the symptom?

We shall make no further progress so long as we fail
to take into account the entire psychic situation of the
little patient as this is revealed to us during analysis. He
finds himself in the jealous and hostile œdipus attitude
to his father, whom, however, in so far as his mother does
not enter into the picture as the cause of dissension, he
loves devotedly. Thus we have a conflict springing from
ambivalence–a firmly founded love and a not less justi-
fied hatred, both directed to the same person. His phobia
must be an attempt to resolve this conflict. Such conflicts
due to ambivalence are very common; we are acquainted
with another typical outcome of them in which one of
the two contending trends, usually the tender one, be-
comes enormously augmented, while the other disap-
pears. Only the excessiveness of the tenderness and its
compulsive character betray the fact that this attitude
is not the only one present, and that it is ever on its guard
to keep the contrary attitude suppressed, making it pos-
sible to construe a train of events which we describe as
repression through reaction formation (in the ego). Cases
like that of little Hans show nothing of such reaction

31

formation; evidently there are various paths of escape
from an ambivalency conflict.
Meanwhile there is something else which we have per-
ceived with certainty. The instinctual impulse which
succumbs to repression is a hostile impulse against the
father. The analysis furnished the evidence of this in
tracing the origin of the idea of the biting horse. Hans
saw a horse fall down; he saw too a playmate with whom
he had played “horsie” fall and hurt himself. The analytic
material has given us the right to construe a wish on
Hans’s part to the effect that his father should fall and
hurt himself as had the horse and Hans’s playmate. Refer-
ences of his to a departure which he saw his father make
lead us to suppose that the wish for his father’s destruc-
tion has also found less timid expression. Such a wish,
however, is equivalent to the intention of doing away
with him himself, to the murderous impulse of the œdipus
complex.

From this repressed instinctual impulse there exists as
yet no pathway to the substitute for it which we assume
the phobia of horses to be. Let us now simplify little
Hans’s emotional situation by leaving out the infantile
factor and the ambivalence; let us call him a younger
servant in a household who is in love with the mistress
of the house and enjoys certain favors at her hands. We
will retain too the element that he hates the master of
the house, who is of course stronger than he, and wishes
he had some means of getting him out of the way; the
most natural upshot of this situation then is that he
would fear revenge or retaliation on the part of this
master, that a state of anxiety in relation to him would be
engendered—quite like little Hans’s phobia of horses.

32

But this means that we cannot term his phobic anxiety
a symptom; if little Hans, in love with his mother, were
to betray fear of his father, we should have no right to
ascribe a neurosis, a phobia, to him. We should, rather,
be confronted merely with a wholly intelligible affective
reaction. That which makes this affective reaction into
a neurosis is singly and solely an altogether different fea-
ture, namely, the substituting of the horse for the father.
It is this displacement, therefore, which produces some
thing deserving of the term symptom; and this is that
other mechanism we have spoken of which permits the
resolving of the ambivalency conflict without recourse
to reaction formation. This displacement, moreover, is
rendered possible or facilitated by the circumstance that
inborn traces of a totemistic mode of thinking can still
be easily activated at this tender age; the gulf between
man and animal is not yet recognized, certainly not so
overemphasized as later. The adult male, admired but
also feared, still belongs in the same category with large
animals, which one envies for many things but against
which one has also been warned because they can be
dangerous. Thus the conflict due to ambivalence is not
worked out in the same person, but is, so to speak, de-
toured, in that one of its component impulses is foisted
upon another person as substitute.

Thus far matters are clear enough, but on another
score the analysis of little Hans’s phobia has been highly
disappointing. The distortion of which the symptom con-
sists is carried out not at all upon the representative (the
ideational content) of the instinctual impulse to be re-
pressed, but upon an entirely different one which corre-
sponds only to a reaction against what is unwelcome-
 

33

se. Our expectation would rather have been that little
Hans would have developed, instead of his fear of horses,
a tendency to maltreat them, to beat them, or would
have given clear expression to his wish to see them fall
down and injure themselves, possibly to die in convul-
sions (the “making a row with the feet”¹⁾). Something of
the kind really occurred during his analysis, but it is not
at all conspicuous in his neurosis, and–curious-
ly enough–if he had developed such hostility as a central symp-
tom, directed against horses only instead of against his
father, we should certainly not have judged that he had
a neurosis. There is something wrong here somewhere,
either in our conception of repression or in our defini-
tion of a symptom. One thing of course strikes us imme-
diately: If little Hans had really manifested such an
attitude towards horses, then repression would not have
altered in the least the character of the objectionable
aggressive instinctual impulse but only transformed its
object.

It is quite certain that there are cases of repression
which do not do more than this. In the genesis of little
Hans’s phobia, however, more has happened; how much
more, we may discover from another analytic fragment.

We already know that little Hans gave as the content
of his phobia the idea of being bitten by a horse. Now we
have since obtained insight into the genesis of another
case of zoöphobia wherein it was a wolf which gave rise
to anxiety but which likewise represented a father sub-
stitute.²⁾ In connection with a dream which the analysis

¹⁾Loc. cit., page 193.–Translator’s Note.

²⁾See From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, Collected Papers,
Vol. III.

34

was able to elucidate, this boy developed a fear of being
eaten by a wolf, like one of the seven little goats in the
fairy story. The authenticated fact that little Hans’s father
had played “horsie” with him was certainly a determin-
ing factor in his choice of the animal causing anxiety; in
the same way, it is at least highly probable that the father
of this second patient, a Russian analyzed in his twenties,
had mimicked a wolf in playing with him as a youngster
and had jokingly threatened to eat him up. I have since
come upon a third case, that of a young American, who
did not develop any animal phobia, it is true, yet in
whom its very absence helped to an understanding of
the other cases. His sexual excitement had been kindled
by a fantastic nursery tale which was read to him of an
Arab sheik who pursued a Gingerbread Man in order to
devour him. With this edible being he identified himself,
the sheik was readily recognizable as a father substitute,
and this fantasy became the first substratum of his au-
toerotic activity. The idea of being eaten by the father
belongs to the typical primal stock of childhood ideas;
analogies from mythology (Kronos) and from animal life
are generally familiar.

Despite such assistance, these ideas are so foreign to
us that it is only with incredulity that we are able to con-
cede them to the child. We also do not know whether
they really mean what they seem to express, and do not
understand how they can become the subject of a phobia.
Analytic experience, of course, gives us the required in-
formation. It tells us that the idea of being eaten by the
father is the regressively debased expression of a tender
passive impulse which craves to be the object of the
father’s love in the sense of genital erotism. The further

35

history of the case permits of no doubt as to the correct-
ness of this interpretation. The genital impulse, it is
true, no longer betrays anything of its tender intent
when it is expressed in the language of the stage of
transition from the oral to the sadistic phase of libido
organization, a stage long since left behind. Is it, more-
over, a question only of a substitution of the instinct-
representative by a regressive mode of expression, or is
it, rather, a genuine regressive debasement of the gen-
itally directed impulse in the id? This seems to be a mat-
ter by no means easy to decide. The clinical history of
the Russian “wolf man” points quite definitely to the
latter more serious possibility, for from the time of the
crucial dream forward he behaved “naughtily,” cruelly
and sadistically, and developed shortly afterwards an out-
right compulsion neurosis. At all events we learn that
repression is not the only means at the command of the
ego whereby it defends itself against an unwelcome in-
stinctual drive. When it succeeds in bringing about the
regression of the impulse, it has inflicted more radical
damage upon the latter, after all, than would be possible
through repression. Occasionally, to be sure, repression
follows upon the regression which the ego has first com-
pelled.

The situation in the case of the “wolf man” and the
somewhat simpler one in that of little Hans suggest a
number of further considerations, but two unexpected
pieces of insight we obtain at once. There can be no
doubt that the repression instinctual impulse which these
phobias represent is a hostile one directed against the
father. One may say that this impulse is repressed by a
process of transformation into its opposite; in place of

36

aggression against the father, there appears the father’s
aggression—retaliation—against the individual himself.
Since such aggression is rooted in the sadistic stage of
libido development in any case, there is only necessary a
certain degree of degradation thereof to the oral level,
such as is intimated in the case of Hans in the being
bitten, but in the Russian is carried out in more forth-
right fashion in the being eaten. But in addition analysis
makes it possible to establish beyond any doubt that si-
multaneously still another instinctual impulse has suc-
cumbed to repression, one of opposite signification,
namely, a tender passive impulse towards the father
which had already reached the threshold of the genital
(phallic) stage of libido organization. This latter seems
even to be the more significant as regards the end-
result of the repressive process; it undergoes the more exten-
sive regression; it obtains the decisive influence upon the
content of the phobia. Where therefore we have traced
the repression of but a single impulse, we have now to
recognize the conjunction of two such processes; the
two instinctual impulses concerned—sadistic aggression
against the father, and a tender passive attitude to him—
form a contrasting pair; nay, more: if we evaluate the
history of little Hans correctly, we recognize that in
addition the tender object-
cathexis of his mother has
been abolished through the creation of his phobia, al-
though of this the content of the phobia betrays no sug-
gestion. We are dealing in the case of Hans—it is much
less definite in the case of the Russian—with a repression
which involves almost every component of the œdipus
complex—the hostile as well as the tender impulse
towards the father, and the tender towards the mother.

37

These are quite unwelcome complications for us whose
desire it was to study only simple cases of symptom forma-
tion resulting from repression, and who had turned for
this purpose to the simplest and seemingly most trans-
parent neuroses, those of childhood. Instead of a single
repression we encountered a host of them, and in addi-
tion to this we had to deal with regression as well. Per-
haps we have only increased the confusion by attempting
to fit both our analyses of zoöphobia, of little Hans and
of the “wolf man,” into the same Procrustean bed. For
certain differences between the two now strike us. It is
only of little Hans that we may declare with assurance
that through his phobia he overcomes the two major
impulses of the œdipus complex, the aggressive impulse
towards the father and the over-tender impulse towards
the mother; tender feelings towards his father are cer-
tainly present also and play their part in the repression
of their opposite, but it cannot be shown either that
they were strong enough to provoke repression or that
they were abolished subsequently. Hans seems to have
been quite a normal youngster, with a so-called positive
œdipus complex. It is possible that the elements which
we fail to find were also coactive in him, but we cannot
demonstrate them; the material even of our most thor-
ough analyses is simply deficient, our documentation in-
complete. In the case of the Russian the lacuna occurs at
another point; his relation to the female object was dis-
turbed by a premature seduction, the passive feminine
component was strongly developed in him, and the analy-
sis of his wolf dream reveals little of intended aggression
against his father—all these provide the most unequivo-
cal proof that the repression has to do with the passive

38

tender attitude to the father. Here again it may be that
other factors played a part, but they are not in evidence.
If, despite these differences between the two cases, which
are almost of the nature of a complete antithesis, the
end-
result of the phobia is nearly the same, the explana-
tion of this fact must come from another source; it comes
from the second result of our little comparative study.
We believe that we know the motive force behind the
repression in both cases and see its rôle substantiated by
the course which the development of the two children
takes. This motive force is in both cases the same—
namely, fear of a threatened castration. It is because of
castration anxiety that little Hans renounces aggression
against his father; his anxiety lest a horse should bite him
can be readily supplemented by saying that his anxiety
is lest a horse should bite off his genital, castrate him. But
it is from castration anxiety also that the little Russian
renounces the wish to be loved by his father as a sexual
object, for he has understood that such a relationship
would have as its prerequisite that he sacrifice his genital
—that which distinguishes him from the female. Both
forms of the Oedipus complex—the normal, active, as
well as the inverted—founder on the castration complex.
The Russian’s fear of being eaten by a wolf contains no
suggestion of castration, it is true; through oral regres-
sion the idea has been removed too far from the phallic
stage; but the analysis of his dream makes any other proof
superfluous. It is furthermore a complete triumph of
repression that in the wording of the phobia there is no
longer anything which hints at castration.

It is in this, then, that our unexpected result consists:
In both cases the motor force behind the repression is

39

castration anxiety; and the content of the anxiety–
being bitten by a horse, or eaten by a wolf–is in each case a
distortion of and substitute for another content, that of
being castrated by the father. It is precisely this content
which has undergone repression as such. In the Russian
the content was the expression of a wish which could not
maintain itself against the revolt of masculinity; in Hans
the expression of a reaction which converted aggression
into its opposite. But the anxiety affect of the phobia
which constitutes its essence does not arise from the
process of repression nor out of the libidinal cathexes of
the repressed impulses, but from the repressing forces
themselves; the anxiety of zoöphobia is transformed cas-
tration anxiety, therefore a real anxiety, a reality fear,
fear of a danger actually threatening or believed to do
so. Here it is the anxiety that causes the repression, and
not, as I earlier stated, the repression the anxiety.

It is not pleasant to think of it, but there is no use in
denying that I have repeatedly put forward the thesis
that through repression the instinctual representative is
distorted, displaced, and the like, and the libido of the
instinctual impulse transformed into anxiety. Study of
the phobias, which should be particularly well calculated
to furnish proof of this thesis, thus fails to confirm it;
rather, it seems completely to contradict it. The fear in
zoöphobia is castration anxiety on the part of the ego,
that in agoraphobia (though this has been less thoroughly
studied) seems to be a fear of temptation, which must
certainly be related genetically to castration anxiety. The
majority of phobias, so far as we can see at present, are
traceable to such a fear on the ego’s part of the demands
of the libido. Always in this situation it is the attitude

40

of anxiety on the part of the ego which is the motive of
and the incitement to repression. Never does the anxiety
emanate from the repressed libido. If I had been content
on earlier occasions simply to say that following upon
repression a certain amount of anxiety appears in place
of the expression of libido that would be expected, I
should not have to retract anything now. The description
is correct, and there does exist the correspondence be-
tween the strength of the impulse to be repressed and the
intensity of the anxiety resulting which I asserted. But I
confess I thought I was giving more than a mere de-
scription; I supposed that I had recognized the meta-
psychological process of a direct transformation of libido
into anxiety; this I can no longer maintain today. I was
unable, besides, to give any account at that earlier time
of how such a transformation was accomplished.
Whence did I derive at all the idea of this transforma-
tion? At a time when we were still a long way from dis-
tinguishing between processes in the ego and processes
in the id, from a study of the “actual” neuroses. I found
that certain sexual practices, such as coitus interruptus,
frustrated excitement, enforced abstinence, give rise to
outbreaks of anxiety and a general predisposition to anx-
iety—which may be induced whenever, therefore, sexual
excitation is inhibited, frustrated or diverted in the
course of its discharge in gratification. Since sexual ex-
citement is the expression of libidinal instinctual im-
pulses, it did not seem rash to suppose that through the
influence of such disturbances the libido became con-
verted into anxiety. Now this observation still holds good
today; on the other hand, it cannot be denied that the
libido of processes in the id is subjected to disturbance

41

INFANTILE ZOÖPHOBIA

by the provocative influence of repression; thus it may
still be correct to say that in repression anxiety is created
out of the libidinal cathexis of instinctual impulses. But
how is one to bring this finding into accord with the
other, namely, that the anxiety of a phobia is an ego
anxiety, originates in the ego, and does not result from
repression but on the contrary evokes it? This seems a
contradiction, and one not simple to resolve. To reduce
the two sources of anxiety to a single one is not easy of
accomplishment. One may attempt it by supposing that
in the situation of interrupted coitus, of intermittent
excitation, of abstinence, the ego scents danger to which
it reacts with anxiety; but this does not get us very far
forward. On the other hand, the analysis of phobias
which we have undertaken does not seem to be open to
correction. Non liquet!