ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud’s case study of Dora was published the same year, 1905, as his book Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. He based this book on his self-analysis and on his treatment of patients like Dora. To discover more direct evidence about sexuality, particularly its development in early childhood, Freud encouraged his friends and students to provide him with direct observations of ‘the sexual life of children’. This was the starting point of his second long case study about Hans. Freud noted that when Hans was three and a half years old, he was preoccupied with his penis. Hans had become phobic not only of horses. He had also become phobic of large animals at the zoo. In Hans’s case, contrast his horse phobia was, it seems, cured by his learning and acquiring confidence that one day he would become a father.
