Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 4 (XII)
Lear is now reviewing Freud’s account of “Little Hans” in Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy. In particular, Lear identifies some of the epistemological difficulties raised by the treatment of a boy whose “concepts” are neither directly accessible to adult observation nor in themselves fully determinate. Little Hans’s use of the term “widdler” is only the most notorious instance of this phenomena.
These difficulties call for some amount of inferential, “reconstructive” work — that is, interpretation of the externals of Hans’s life — if Freud is going to identify the infantile “wishes” pervading the boy’s inner life. Hence his outward emotional trajectory led from
an initial, outward-looking cheerfulness, through
a period of shyness, to
a diffuse anxiety, and finally to
a particular phobia
On the basis of these observable changes, Freud hypothesizes an “internal” economy of wishes, whose fates — whose satisfactions and frustrations — are manifested in those external changes. Predictably, Freud theorizes that an intense affection for the mother, and its subsequent repression, are effectively responsible for these changes. So, in the idiom of “wishes”: “[R]epression transformed his longing into a voracious anxiety capable of swallowing up Hans’s emotional life” (104, my italics).
Now Lear’s “developmental” reading, as he has taken to calling it, complicates Freud’s idea of the “path” from unconscious to conscious. For according to Freud’s official account, a higher organization is achieved when the “thing-representation” of archaic mental life is “linked with an appropriate word-representation” (105). But as Lear argues, Freud’s own case history suggests that considerably more is involved than “the attachment of a word to a thing-representation” (106). It is not as though archaic mental phenomena — associative, imagistic, self-contradictory — are in any condition simply to be “labeled” by the determinate, discrete, mutually-exclusive, and fixed concepts borne by words. Before any such “attachment” can be established, the anarchy of primary-process must itself be called into some kind of order. “The thing-representations themselves must be disciplined so that a word can legitimately be applied” (106). Hence what is finally entailed in making an unconscious thought a conscious one is “the acquisition of a concept” (106). That is, the unconscious thought lacks more than a “word,” to which it can be externally attached; as yet it lacks the conceptual form that would enable that application.
Little Hans’s development exhibits, among other things, “the incorporation of a concept at the level of both word and thing” (106). In fact, his horse-phobia illustrates precisely an attempt to achieve this higher psychical organization — with mixed success, of course. The phobia imparts a concept to Hans’s diffuse, free-floating anxiety — anxiety originating in recently repressed Oedipal longings and threats. Anxiety, “fear of an unconceptualized object” (107), contracts in phobias into fear-proper: a particular object or class of objects. (One may subsequently “manage” this fear by, for example, avoiding the object; whereas anxiety überhaupt admits of no such management.) This emotional shift from anxiety to fear, pace Freud’s own picture of emotion-as-discharge, signals a new world-orientation. Horses now “show up” for Hans as objects to fear; his experience is re-organized accordingly.
Again, Freud himself interprets that, while the anxiety is initially connected with Hans’s father, repression prevents Hans from becoming fearful of the “proper” object. (Horses become consciously admissible “receptacles” for another fear that is in itself determinate.)This theorization implies that Hans’s “fear of the father” (108) is a tidy and determinate — albeit unconscious — thought-content, which could simply be “transferred onto horses” (109). Thus it is one and same fear, at one time of a father-object, at another of a horse-object. This, in any case, is the official line: “Repression consists in sundering the idea of the father and attaching the emotion to another object” (109).
Though Freud’s topic is no longer Breuer, hysterics, and cathartic method, the wording of these descriptions suggest a return of sorts. For if Hans’s psychic dilemma really were as Freud reconstructs it, it would follow that the boy had erroneously displaced one and the same quantum of psychic energy — his fear — from father to horse. And the phobia could be resolved by “discharging” the emotion onto its appropriate object.
But we have seen that Lear rejects this model, and why. If Lear’s conception of emotional development is correct, though — if, in particular, the path from unconscious content to conscious idea involves more than external attachment but, beyond this, the incorporation of a concept — then we must explain the narrative of Hans, too, along different lines. This theoretical revision will affect our view of repression, as well. Lear writes:
“On the developmental model…that which would have resolved itself into fear of the father is prevented from doing so. Repression consists in inhibiting this process of resolution and in promoting the wrong sort of conceptualization” (109).
Again, it is not as though the phobic Hans possesses a fully-determinate “concept” — something like, ‘I am afraid of my father’ — with the merely formal qualification that this conceptual self-understanding is “unconscious” rather that “conscious.” Nor is it the case that the (relatively conceptualized) self-understanding Hans does consciously enjoy — ‘I am afraid of horses’ — simply reflects the “transfer” of a determinate fear from the “right” to the “wrong,” symbolically-associated object.
Rather, the original situation — given Freud’s own understanding of primary process — is that Hans’s fear of his father was proto-conceptual. Repression precisely obstructed this fear’s articulation into the right sort of conceptual, conscious, and appropriately-directed form. Indeed, it is for just this reason that the imagistic, indeterminate fear could articulate itself through the associative links of Hans’s eventual phobia. As Lear puts it: “But it is not that the conscious idea of a horse is substituted for the unconscious idea of the father. Rather, for Hans’s unconscious, there is no significant difference between fathers and horses” (109). An analysis, finally, would usher this fear into a form it has never actually assumed: namely, that “concept” provided by a sound interpretation. Strictly speaking, Hans neither consciously nor unconsciously “fears his father” — in that conceptual form — until interpretation “realizes” it for him.
We will conclude our discussion of Chapter 4 in the next entry.