ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I reconstruct and evaluate what I call the “repression argument,” Freud’s most direct attempt to empirically confirm his core Oedipal-theoretic claim that Hans’s anxiety symptoms are caused by repressed sexual desire for his mother. He does this by testing the theory’s distinctive predictions about changes in Hans’s sexual behavior over time, in what amounts to an N=1 empirical study. Despite its potential power, this argument has been entirely overlooked in the literature. Freud’s sexual-repression account of Hans’s phobia implies three predictions: Hans had heightened sexual desire in the period leading up to the phobia’s outbreak; he experienced conflict over sexuality and repressed this desire just prior to the outbreak of the phobia; and subsequent to the phobia’s onset, manifestations of sexual desire decreased markedly. With Hans’s sexual desire operationalized primarily by frequency of masturbation and of expressed longing for contact with his mother, a close examination of the case evidence reveals that these predictions fail to be confirmed by Hans’s sexual behavior.
