ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I confront and resolve a century-old dispute about what day Little Hans saw a horse fall down, which was the incident that triggered his horse phobia. Strangely enough, the answer to this question determines whether Freud can preemptively protect his Oedipal theory of Hans’s horse phobia from its primary rival, the “fright theory” or conditioning theory. The answer turns out to have been staring us in the face all this time. By correlating the description of the day Hans saw the horse fall down with the description of his activity on the day Freud says he saw the horse fall down, Freud is shown to be incorrect in his claim that Hans’s anxiety disorder started too early for it to be accounted for by a fright from the horse accident.
