ABSTRACT
‘If his lips are silent,’ Freud famously wrote of the patient in analysis, ‘he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. And thus the task of making conscious the most hidden recesses of the mind is one which it is quite possible to accomplish.’ 1 Silence may well occur, with the analysand's free associations coming to a halt, or scarcely beginning, if they are melancholically depressed, phobic, or obsessive. Noting that when his patient, Little Hans, was 4 he explained his phobia of going out to his mother by telling her, ‘I was afraid a horse would bite me’, and noting that Hans told him he was frightened of what ‘horses wear in front of their eyes and by the black round their mouths’, Freud also noted the similarity between this and the appearance of Hans' father's spectacles and moustache. 2 The blackness served as a sign to Hans of his father's anger of which Hans was frightened, said Freud, because he was so fond of his mother.
