ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of Freud’s Oedipal-theoretic analysis of Hans’s horse phobia as background for examining his evidence and specific arguments for his major conclusions in later chapters. In particular, the chapter maps Freud’s explanation for how the incident that precipitated Hans’s phobia, his witnessing of a horse falling down in the street, aroused several strands of Hans’s repressed Oedipal desires and fears—in particular, his desire to see his father fall down dead and his fear that his father would castrate him as punishment for this wish and for his wish to possess his mother and in some inchoate sense to have sex with her. The chapter reconstructs the main mediating memories, the Lizzi and Fritzl incidents, that Freud claims are the pathways for the associations from the horse accident to Oedipal contents. The chapter also briefly considers the case’s confirmation of Freud’s claim that children naturally have sexual feelings, as well as the somewhat confusing things Freud says about the nature of health and illness, and Freud’s diagnosis of Hans as having anxiety hysteria.
