Infantile Zoöphobia

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 complicated 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? Development 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 symptom. 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 supposititious 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, 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 repression 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 intention 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 kindnesses 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 symptom; 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 totemistic 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 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 formation 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 inclination 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. Something there is not in order, either in our comprehension of the repression 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[2] 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 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 himself with this edible man while the chieftain was readily recognizable 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 saying 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 regressive degraded expression of a passive tender excitation which wishes to be loved by the father as an object in the sense of genital eroticism. 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 compulsion neurosis. In any case we gain the insight that the suppression 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 aggression---revenge---of the father is directed toward one's own person. 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 important for the end result of the process of repression; it experiences a further reaching regression and maintains the determining influence 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 contrasting 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 content 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 repression, 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 complex. 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 imperfect. In the Russian the defect is in another place; its relation to the female object is disturbed by a precocious seduction; the passive, 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 corroborated 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 contain 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 opposite. But the fear affect of the phobia which makes up its nature, does not originate in the process of repression, nor from the libidinous fixations of the suppressed impulses but from that which is repressed. The fear in the zoöphobia is the untransformed castration 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 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 contradict 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 correspondence which I asserted doubtless exists. But I confess that I believe I gave more than a mere description, in assuming that I had recognized 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 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.