ABSTRACT
Little Hans, a five-year-old boy, suffered from a phobia which expressed itself as a fear that a white horse might bite him. This phobia later expanded to include a fear of horses falling down and of heavily laden vehicles such as carts, buses or furniture vans. The act of holding on to/letting go of faeces – which Freud argued were equivalent to the penis – also provides the child with another explanation of the nature of the mother's widdler: perhaps she can also retract and let go her widdler as if it were faeces. In a later dream Hans imagines that ‘the plumber came; and first he took away Hans behind with a pair of pincers, and then gave the Hans another, and then the same with Hans widdler’. Freud writes: ‘Hans's father grasped the nature of this wishful phantasy, and did not hesitate a moment as to the only interpretation it could bear.’.
