ABSTRACT
Late in the Hans case history, Hans describes the incident that triggered his fear, namely, his witnessing a horse pulling a bus-wagon fall down in the streets of Vienna, kicking loudly. Prior to the case, critics of Freud’s sexual theory of the neuroses, starting with Freud’s colleague Joseph Breuer, held that neuroses could be caused by strong emotional reactions that are not sexual, especially intense fear. This approach to the Hans case, postulating that it was Hans’s fright at seeing the horse accident that explains his phobia, started soon after the publication of the case and culminated in 1960 in a famous article by behaviorists Joseph Wolpe and Stanley Rachman, who presented a conditioning explanation of Hans’s phobia and critiqued Freud’s reasoning in the case. The “fright” theory of the etiology of Hans’s horse phobia is a compelling rival and Freud understood it as a real threat to his Oedipal theory in terms of evidential support and explanatory power. In anticipation of dissecting Freud’s arguments in the Hans case that are attempts to reply to the fright theory in later chapters, I review the history of this rival theory in this chapter.
