ABSTRACT
The youngest pioneer in the history of psychoanalysis left a few lessons: to Freud, to Lacan, and to us, psychoanalysts of the twenty-first century. He was able to demonstrate that a child of less than five can become a fully-fledged and competent analysand, thus inaugurating one hundred and ten years of psychoanalysis with children as a fertile field of clinical practice and theoretical production. His original words inspired the Freudian conception of anxiety hysteria and phobias. His participation in the family drama and his views on it enabled Lacan to elaborate conceptually on the paternal metaphor and the function of the Name-of-the-Father and its deficiencies in the neuroses. This chapter explains how the case history of little Hans became an essential reference point for Lacan’s theses on the object relation and the birth of desire.
