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Beyond the autoerotic, Hans's love objects range from his "two little
girls" at the skating rink (paradoxically, each of the girls is twice the
boy's age) to his visiting six-year-old male cousin. According to Freud,
through his object choices, Hans acts the roles of polygamous husband and
enthralled homosexual lover. "Little Hans seems to be a paragon of all
the vices" (p. 57). Rather than engaging/enjoying his love objects
themselves, Hans "shares" his erotic fascination with his father. Freud
does not  address
the boy's seductive ploys at the point of this vice intrigue, but their
effects on the analytic process cannot be ignored. Why is the father at
the center of the boy's erotic universe? The notion of love relationships
with other children proves inadequate to explain Hans's constant probing
of his father. Does the boy desire other children, or is the harangue about
the little girls and cousin an attempt to manipulate the father through
jealousy? While the father notices possibilities of eroticism in the boy's
play with other children, Hans's "annoying" questions highlight a scenario
of triangulation. "'Where are my little girls? When are my little girls
coming?' And for some weeks he kept tormenting me with the question: 'When
am I going to the Rink to see my little girls?"' (p. 57). Hans asks his
father about his child lovers; the boy's very reliance on the response
positions the father within the network of erotic games. At the moment
when the suffering father acknowledges his state of torment, the analytic
veil is irreparably punctured. By seductive maneuvers, Little Hans controls
the situation. No longer the figure of "Oedipal Father," Hans's father tumbles
into his own unconscious drama. Through the "act" of acknowledging torment,
his unconscious issues become as much at stake as the boy's issues. Much
like Freud's reactions in the earlier "Dora" case study on hysteria, the
depth of the father's response to his son's erotic game points to the phenomenon
of countertransference: it is no longer clear who is analyzing whom.
In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not
to be found either in a psychological or a biological sense. Every individual
. . . displays a mixture of the character traits belonging to his own and
to the opposite sex; and he shows a combination of activity and passivity
whether or not these last character traits tally with his biological ones.6
Freud's findings in the "Little Hans" case study include a poignant statement
about the strength of a child's love for his same-sex parent. "And Hans
deeply loved the father against whom he cherished death wishes; and while
his intellect demurred to such a contradiction, he could not help demonstrating
the fact of its existence, by hitting his father and then immediately kissing
the place he had hit" (p. 149). Little Hans follows the classic Oedipal
paradigm, yet he punishes himself for his desire to inflict pain upon his
father. Inscribed within the description of castration threats, phobias,
and perversions are moments of non-erotically charged love. The boy's expressions
of aggression are bound to conciliatory expressions of tenderness. In line with
this phenomenon of linked aggression and tenderness, Freud posits a model
of bisexuality based on the expression of the psychological characteristics
of active and passive relations: All human beings are essentially bisexual
as psychological structures. "Resisting the notions of 'masculine' and
'feminine' . . . Freud was to argue for 'active' and 'passive' relations,
connecting sexuality to the situation of the subject."7
This notion of bisexuality brings forward the question of environment.
If individuals are essentially bisexual, what ultimately determines their
"dominant" mode of sexuality? Where Freud minimizes the importance of the
external, social world on the psychic development of the boy, insofar as
it exceeds the corrective parameters of the family, he alludes to it with
his notion of situation. Little Hans's "escape" from the neurotic world
of feces babies, horrifyingly obese horses, giant widdlers, and collapsing
furniture vans represents his active reconciliation with the world as much
as it represents his passive integration into the world of consolidating
knowledge.
In bringing up children we aim only at being left in
peace and having no difficulties, in short, at training up a model child,
and we pay very little attention to whether such a course of development
is for the child's good as well. I can therefore imagine that it may have
been to Hans's advantage to have produced [a] phobia; for it directed his
parents' attention to the unavoidable difficulties by which a child is
confronted when in the course of his cultural training he is called upon
to overcome the innate instinctual components of his mind, and his trouble
brought his father to his assistance. (p. l78)
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