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 John O’Neill
TC The Domestic Economy of the Soul TC
S
S ‘One could perhaps place O’Neill’s theoretical framework among those of the object-
relations analysts of the 1920’s and 1930’s. These analysts believed, as does O’Neill,

The Domestic Economy of the Soul

that psychic life takes its shape from the mother’s body and being. The beauty of
O’Neill’s book does not lie in its theoretical framework, however, but within his
attention to detail. O’Neill proposes that Freud’s cases were his own fictionalized
Theory, Culture & Society

accounts of various patients which represent Freud’s own universalizing theories.

Anyone who is interested in the closest reading you could find of Freud’s cases will
want to add O’Neill’s most recent book to your bookshelf.’
Ellie Ragland, Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Middlebush
Chair and Editor of (Re-)turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies.

‘The pleasure of reading O’Neill lies in his encounter with Freud as an unruly writer,
rather than solely as a theorist of the sexual body or therapist of mental suffering.
He shows us how the resistance of the patient’s desire to the power of the analyst
is reflected and refracted in the struggle of readers with the texts of the five case
histories. O’Neill’s symptomatic readings of an impressive range of clinical and
critical literature expose how the scientific ambitions of psychoanalysis cannot be
separated from its family romances and its civilizing mythologies. At the same time,
his illuminating visual displays of Little Hans’s drawings, Dora’s dreams, the Rat
Man’s thought-trains, the Wolf Man’s cryptology, and Schreber’s swan pair introduce
us into the blindness and insights of Freud’s own psychic economy. This wonderful
collection of studies and stories – which have been refined through generations of
graduate seminars and tested before multiple audiences – will challenge readers
with the gift of O’Neill’s formidable interpretive acumen and uniquely lyrical voice.’
Thomas M. Kemple, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of
British Columbia and author of Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the
Market, and the ‘Grundrisse’.

This is the first major analysis of Freud’s five celebrated case studies of Little Hans, Dora,
the Rat Man, the Wolf Man and Schreber. O’Neill sets out the details of each case and
critically engages with the narratives using a mixture of psychoanalytical insight and
social theory.
The book:
• Provides a clear and powerful account of the five major case studies that helped to
establish the Freud legend.
• Situates the cases and the analysis in the appropriate social and historical contexts

The Domestic
• Offers distinctive interpretations of the symptomatic body, illness as a language,
dream work and the Madonna complex.
• Challenges us to revisit the canonical texts of psychoanalysis.

The book will be of interest to students of psychoanalysis, social theory and sociology.
Economy of the Soul
O’Neill

John O’Neill is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at York University,

Toronto, Canada. Freud’s Five Case Studies

Cover image © iStockphoto | Cover design by Wendy Scott

 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

00-O'Neil-4124-Prelims.indd 1 15/11/2010 5:20:39 PM

 Theory, Culture & Society
Theory, Culture & Society caters for the resurgence of interest in culture
within contemporary social science and the humanities. Building on the
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EDITOR: Mike Featherstone, Nottingham Trent University

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Roy Boyne, University of Durham
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00-O'Neil-4124-Prelims.indd 2 15/11/2010 5:20:39 PM

 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

Freud’s Five Case Histories

John O’Neill

00-O'Neil-4124-Prelims.indd 3 15/11/2010 5:20:40 PM

 © John O’Neill 2011

First published 2011

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or

private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication
may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by
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 For Susan

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00-O'Neil-4124-Prelims.indd 6 15/11/2010 5:20:40 PM
 Contents

Acknowledgements viii
Publisher’s Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1
Love stories 2
The body-soul of psychoanalysis 8

1 Freud’s Baby – Little Hans (1909) 13

Putting the cart before the horse 32

2 Opening the Dora Case (1905 [1901]) 43

Dora’s dreams 63
Portraits of Dora 76
Dora’s Sistine Madonna 82

3 Rat Man’s Lady (1909) 97

A case of blindness and (in)sight 99
Chorisis versus cartography 105
Catching Rat Man’s train of thought 115
Rat Man’s (mis)marriage 121

4 Wolf Man’s Wake (1918 [1914]) 129

Supplement and rectification 134
Wolf Man’s cryptology 149

5 Schreber’s Blessed Assumption (1911 [1910]) 157

Schreber’s unmanning/gynesis 168
Schreber’s swan song 182

Concluding Postscript: The Debts of Psychoanalysis 211

Bibliography 216
Index 225

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 Acknowledgements

I want to thank all those graduate students in Social and Political

Thought who have engaged with close readings of Freud’s case his-
tories since the Tuesday seminars we began at home in the late after-
noons where for a few hours in Toronto we were caught up in the
romance between Vienna and London. The pace of our work was
substantially advanced by a Social Science and Humanities Research
Council Grant for Studies in Textual Psychoanalysis (1988–1991).
I should mention in particular Tom Kemple, Geoff Miles, Gary
Genosko and Peter Flaherty who produced innovative dissertations
and later works that stand in their own right. In the past decade, my
seminars on Psychoanalysis, Law and Culture have remained lively
through the creative energies of Mark Featherstone, Siobhan Holohan,
Molly Mann, Frank Scherer, Igor Gontcharov, Frank Cimino, Feiyu
Sun, Raan Matalon and Adnan Selimovic.
In the same period, my approach to Freud’s texts was road tested
through university invitations at Hawaii, Stanford, Berkeley and
Boston, as well as McGill University, the University of Toronto, University
College, Dublin and the Universities of Kent, London and Cambridge.
The circle was completed by Ivan Ward’s generous invitation to talk
at the Freud Museum in London, a few miles from where I grew up
in ignorance of all this!
Finally, since I continue to handwrite in my study, I have no chance
of appearing in print without the generous support of Brad King
and Jordana Lobo-Pires and, of course, Susan – who graciously brings
the typescript home to book.

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 Publisher’s Acknowledgements

Permission to use figures and text from the Standard Edition of

Sigmund Freud’s works by arrangement with Paterson Marsh Ltd.,
London.
Chapter 5 extracts reprinted by permission of the publisher from
MEMOIRS OF MY NERVOUS ILLNESS by Daniel Paul Schreber,
translated and edited by Ida MacAlpine and Richard A. Hunter, with
a New Introduction by Samuel M. Weber, pp. xviii, xxxvii, 52, 79,
175, 208–210, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright
© 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Introduction
to the 1988 Edition © 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College.

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00-O'Neil-4124-Prelims.indd 10 15/11/2010 5:20:40 PM
 Introduction

What I am calling The Domestic Economy of the Soul is the scene of

imaginative struggles within the family and between the analyst and
surrendered patients. What is at stake is the resistance to Freud’s
founding of the oedipal family in the refinding of the mothered family
that accepts a child apart from any legacy of murder and usurpation,
yet not without pain and difficulty.
Thus in the largely ignored story of Little Hans we have a narrative
punctuated by diagrams, drawings, fairy tales, a bestiary and dreams
through which Freud’s baby acts out his resistance to psychoanalysis.
Similar tactics are revealed in Dora’s three-way struggle with the
husbands/wives/fathers/mothers who seduce and are seduced by
her. Rat Man is, likewise, extraordinarily caught between his mother
and ‘mistress’, acting out an impossible rail journey, consumating an
onastic marriage to obviate the maternal love. These case histories
are all relatively short, perhaps due to Freud’s anxiety to prove his
own premature analytic power. Yet Wolf Man resisted Freud’s embrace
all his life, setting up an extraordinary bestiary of wolves, butterflies
and bums to resist homosexualization in the name of psychoanalysis.
Likewise Schreber, whose own account of his divine flight into
motherhood sets up the extraordinary intertextual struggle with
the patristic texts of Freud and Schreber’s own father’s Christian
work-out manual.
While feminist critics have struggled with Freud’s elision of
woman, they have differed among themselves over the eternal
maternal/feminine (das Ewig-Weibliche). Yet Freud’s maternal archae-
ology constantly returns to the self-birthing male god/artist/scientist,
as I show in Little Hans’ acting out, Dora’s Madonna trance and
Schreber’s divine Assumption. Freud is the founding mother of psy-
choanalysis, at the mercy of young Dora and Little Hans, more harsh
with Wolf Man and deaf to Schreber. Yet, the case histories are also
a self-monument to the founding father of psychoanalysis. I have
tried to show how these rival self-concepts are deeply woven into
the textual economy of Freud’s case histories in a polyvocal text that
plays upon the logico-scientific narratives of biology, neurology and

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

chemistry, as well as anthropology, archaeology and mythology. But

we only know this from a patient reading of the case histories them-
selves. So it is not a question of exposing Freud’s contradictions, as
though Freud himself were not the source of a necessary attempt at
revision, to revise and return to the texts of psychoanalysis itself. For
this reason I have made a point of giving a very close account of each
case history before taking on the clinical and critical literature dedi-
cated to them.
Because Freud’s text moves by a constant ‘oversight’ and ‘revision’,
its readers are obliged not to try to fix this in any literal fashion. By
the same token, the history of the psychoanalytic movement might
itself have been written with a similar allowance for revision. The
blind-spots (‘oversights’) in Freud’s text surely constitute an oedipal
dimension in psychoanalytic theory itself. Every insight of the theory
is interwoven with its own blindness, every interpretation may suffer
from an ‘over-interpretation (Uberdeutung)’, every discovery may
leave something hidden, unfaced. Freud says as much. But the sons
and daughters of theory need to tread warily. The defeats of the
paternal interpretation are noted by the father himself; they are con-
stituted by the theorist’s self-satisfaction. Freud confesses his faults
but loves the working passions – the very literary body of psycho-
analysis. It belongs to the pleasure of the Freudian text so that its
movement sways back and forth (nachträglich), so that its author
knows where it leads and misleads him, where it yields insight and
where it blinds him. In this way, Freud can invite and repel every
resistance to the basic insights of psychoanalysis on the ground that
its rivals, revisionists and critics will ‘overlook’ or refuse to ‘see’ its
fundamental discovery of the unconsciousness as the productive
source of all insight and blindness.

Love stories

I am inclined to treat psychoanalytic theory as a lover’s discourse,

feeding upon its own uncertainty except for those blissful moments
of grasp and comprehension that it must nevertheless shake off if it
is not to die. All thought swings between economy and excess,
between elegance and endlessness. To keep these extremes apart,
thought needs a path, a wood, a lake, a cave, a goddess – just as Eros
and Thanatos must be polarized and not overlap. In this way thought
may set Death, or Love, as its own goal, as the Lady of its soul. But
of course the soul may just as well be hunted and haunted by its
dreams, visions and knowledge, rising up from within the soul’s

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 Introduction

unconscious, its writing body. I have decided to use the term ‘soul’
in order to emphasize that the proper site of psychoanalysis is where
the mental and the corporeal elements of conduct are suffused with
each other. This usage is not meant to ‘spiritualize’ Freud. Rather, it
recovers Freud’s original phenomenology of the soul as conscious
and unconscious behaviour which was overlaid with a cognitivist
gloss in the Strachey translation (Bettelheim, 1983). In my view,
psychoanalysis is bound to the narrative of a double birth – to our
origin in the mother-body and to the origins of the desire to give
birth, like her, to ourselves or to give birth, like the father, to the law,
to the arts and sciences. I believe the phantasy of parthenogenesis
lies at the heart of Freud’s conception of psychoanalysis, although it
is never wholly present but found only in its parcelling out in the
case histories. I do not mean that Freud espoused an ‘amniotic nos-
talgia’ (Gunn, 1988: 189). But neither did he ever shatter the mater-
nal mirror. True, Freud resisted the return to the maternal origin in the
Name-of-the-Father. Yet he also understood that the Father was dead,
the ghost of a blind, incestuous love whose price the son would pay
off with his own sacrifice. Thus it is in Death that Freud phantasized
the reconciliation (Versöhnung) of difference, tying birth to its end,
engendering memory and the unconscious as the ‘time-in-between’
of psychoanalysis.
In psychoanalysis we are dealing only with an illness inside lan-
guage. The limit of an illness is the absence of its language. The
beginning of a cure is the symptom which calls attention to itself in
another language, on the body, in dreams, in speech or in writing.
Health is an expressed need, beginning with the baby’s cry and rising
to the lover’s song. Art, music and literature save the body-soul from
illness by articulating the suffering flesh on the level of intelligence
and community. In between, desire is aroused by any little thing
the body can lose, of which it may despair, in which it may delight –
the tiniest thing or fetish. Illness demands a mythology, an expressed
complaint. Patients are storytellers. Analysts are listeners, trying to
reconstruct the family in which the patient’s story begins and runs
its course as a symptomatology with its own style. A little art sepa-
rates the course of an illness from the case of an illness, separates the
poet from patient. Freud was in love with women in confinement –
mothers and hysterics who were loved by God like the mystics. In
this regard, all the case histories are love stories:
From this mystical position, inherited from women who took from an
absent God what he did not have – a body with a phallus that satisfied
them – Lacan drew a lesson for psychoanalysis: the analyst too is one

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

who gives what he does not have and who refuses to give what he does
have. The psychoanalyst is a creature of love and psychoanalysis, an
amorous discipline, an erotic theory, a craft of pure jouissance. (Clément,
1983: 143)
Nothing predestined Freud’s creation of psychoanalysis. Yet he
spoke of it – as is the general tendency – as a birth, thereby casting
destiny in the figure of the woman he himself sought to be. Like
Schreber, throughout his life Freud submitted himself to the des-
tiny of woman. Feminist critics who have focused upon the Dora
case (Bernheimer and Kahane, 1985) have perhaps been too easy
in their rejection of Freud’s incomprehension of the dark conti-
nent of womanhood. Rather, Freud seems never to have been free
from the project of exploring womanhood. The tendency in males
and females to reject woman’s sexuality is the sexual riddle wor-
thy of Freud’s patient career. This is certainly not a matter of
sexual ideology as so many contemporary critics insist. Moreover,
it is inscribed in Freud’s very name that woman’s joy (Freude)
should set the scene for his research, just as he inscribed his
daughters with the names of other women, binding past, present
and future to the destiny of psychoanalysis (Appignanesi and
Forrester, 2005). The riddle of psychoanalysis, therefore, is not
woman herself but woman as women, i.e., as the Three Fates, the
dance and dice of the Graces.
Freud believed that the future would be the deferred past. We
understand ourselves not by what we are presently saying and doing
but through the gaps in our behaviour that reveal ‘in another lan-
guage’ or, in the peculiarities of our expression, a past wish:
‘Happiness is the deferred (nachträglich) fulfilment of a prehistoric
wish’ (1997). Indeed, Freud himself founded psychoanalysis on the
very same archaeological metaphor whose practice had thrilled him
in his childhood studies of Schliemann’s Troy. The levels of the
unconscious became Freud’s Rome which he dreamed of conquering
through psychoanalysis. Lacan has nicely set out the contents of the
‘censored chapter’ around which our personal unconscious history
gravitates:
– in monuments: this is my body. That is to say, the hysterical nucleus
of the neurosis in which the hysterical symptom reveals the struc-
ture of a language, and is deciphered like an inscription which, once
recovered, can without serious loss be destroyed;
– in archival documents: these are my childhood memories just as
impenetrable as are such documents when I do not know their
provenance;

01-O'Neil-4124-Introduction.indd 4 13/11/2010 10:19:59 AM

 Introduction

– in semantic evolution: this corresponds to the stock of words and

acceptations of my own particular vocabulary, as it does to my style
of life and to my character;
– and, lastly, in the traces that are inevitably preserved by the distor-
tions necessitated by the linking of the adulterated chapter to the
chapters surrounding it, and whose meaning will be re-established
by my exegesis. (Lacan, 1977a: 50)

The bedrock of psychoanalytic theory is that an early trauma may

achieve significance with the accrual of later experiences which
recontextualize it, so to speak, at the same time that it furnishes the
missing clue in the text that waits to give it its full significance and
without which it remains a painful puzzle.
Each of the case histories will open up the function of literature in
the psychic economy – the necessity of Freud’s being both a writer
and a doctor, if not Freud’s inescapable fate of becoming a character
in his own histories. What Freud discovered in writing the case his-
tories was that their narrativity could not hold the line. As we can
see in Rat Man’s case, the story is subject to an unconscious branch-
ing (chorisis), side tracking and repetition that continuously defer the
action they seek to represent. By the same token, Freud was pre-
vented from mastering his own discovery and so we do not fault him
by retracing the symptomatic text he has left us. However, this very
feature of the over- and undetermined nature of Freud’s writing
must be taken to heart by those critics who persist in employing
Freud’s insights to fault his vision with their own pretended clarity,
if not virtue. An author cannot be held to reading her/himself and
not at all in the course of writing that which s/he must nevertheless
sign out of linguistic compliance (sprachliches entgegenkommen) with
the desire to write (O’Neill, 2001). Only in his personal myth is
Freud the source of Freud. Rather, Freud is known to us only through
an uncanny indirection that is circumscribed in the case histories. It
is a myth of science that any science can cast off its own history as a
snake would lose its skin. Thus psychoanalysis cannot lean upon
itself and the case histories must read like short stories (wie Novellen),
just as today philosophy must read like psychoanalysis.
Freud imposed upon the psychoanalytic text – or, rather, he strug-
gled with – the same constraints that the patient experiences in com-
ing to terms with his or her own experience. These constraints are not
a matter of literary etiquette. On the contrary, the ‘literary’ is itself
constituted through these constraints which repeat the oedipal narra-
tive in the particular register of the analysand. Freud set the human
sciences on a permanently hermeneutical inquiry as the only mode of

01-O'Neil-4124-Introduction.indd 5 13/11/2010 10:19:59 AM

 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

self-knowledge adequate to the phenomena of psychic illness, while

those who predicted the consequences of psychoanalysis resisted this
unsuccessfully. On the other hand, those who were open to psycho-
analysis could not foresee its consequences. Within this history of
acceptance and rejection Freud’s text remains a labyrinth of paths
taken and paths not taken in psychoanalysis. At any point in the text
we can never escape the shadows that surround its light. Nor can we
avoid responsibility for the particular reading of Freud we ourselves
undertake as a step in our own direction of understanding and mis-
understanding the texts. Such protestations seem disingenuous. Yet
Freud insisted that they were necessary because of the public’s refusal
of the central finding of infantile sexuality and the precipitant history
of the primal scene. If Freud’s public could hardly believe their ears,
his readers could hardly believe their eyes. Indeed, the affront brought
by psychoanalysis both to educated opinion and to common sense
never recedes. Nor is there any chance of it doing so, since it is key to
psychoanalysis that it locate the origin of thought in a deliberate
oversight established by our earliest bodily enquiry. The public does
not wish to see itself in the family romances of psychoanalysis. At
times, Freud appeals to the impartiality of his ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’,
seeming to persuade himself that it is in his power to create an ideal
audience as impassioned witnesses to the primal scene. In his treat-
ment of Little Hans, he risks rejection by calling our primal history to
the attention of a civilized audience whose response to his discovery
of an otherwise forgotten past was to treat Freud himself as an exam-
ple of a civilized failure tout court. His science ran all the dangers of
marginalization or censorship for its threat to the very boundaries
of civilized perception and morality. Moreover, Freud’s tu quoque
appeared to be an insolent and infantile rebuke of the very generation
it depended upon for acceptance. Yet once the question of infantile
sexuality was made public – on the basis that it was now posed for
the first time as a scientific question – psychoanalysis had redrawn
civilized history, shortening the distance between childhood and
adulthood.
Freud knew enough science to know that it could not proceed with-
out its proper fictions. So, in worrying about the fictional nature of
the case histories, he was not so much concerned about their meth-
odological defects as he was jealous of the rival insights of literary
fiction which seemed to have grasped psychoanalysis avant la lettre.
Moreover, the great models of science and literature that attracted
Freud were closer in style than they affect to be nowadays. They also
shared the same public stage with the theatre so that Charcot’s clinical

01-O'Neil-4124-Introduction.indd 6 13/11/2010 10:19:59 AM

 Introduction

performances were especially seductive to Freud in his early days. Yet

the case histories are not stage performances. They do not rely upon
hypnotism, nor do they command bodies to obey the high-priest of
science. Rather, Freud shifted the theatre of psychoanalysis into that
intimate space of conversation and dream to which the analyst had
to apprentice himself most acutely. He began to decipher a corporeal
script whose language so resisted translation on the level of the scien-
tific text that he was obliged to invent the very genre of the case
history in which to record the events that constituted its practice. The
discovery of the infant body’s memory renewed the fictive capac-
ity of all the arts and sciences and, indeed, this represents Freud’s
greatest contribution to human history.
We cannot speak of Freud’s patients without realizing the pressure
they were under to become Freudians – that is, at once patients
and discovering analysts in these early years of psychoanalysis.
Contemporary critics often fail to allow Freud an historical ‘dis-
count’ on his mistakes, preferring instead to stone the omnipotent
father for his sins, among which is the very omnipotence they them-
selves insist upon attributing to him. Of course, Freudians are not
alone in this practice. It is a curiosity of contemporary criticism that
it is obsessed with the pronouncements of a handful of critics who
simultaneously pronounce the death of the author and the fragmen-
tation of all texts (O’Neill, 1992a). These critics nevertheless reas-
semble the tablets. Thus the events of modernist and postmodernist
criticism are bound to the critical narrative just as the events in
Freud’s encounter with ‘his’ patients are tied to the clinical histories
that have rendered them ‘unforgettable’. To some extent, we are
‘repeating’ Freud’s own practice inasmuch as he found in art and
literature – but also in the sciences of his day – anticipations of the
fundamental content and methods of psychoanalysis. Yet Freud
reversed things. He considered the patient’s illness to be a ‘work of
art’ in itself, thereby setting for psychoanalysis the task of ‘represent-
ing’ the ‘clinical portrait’ that it could never wholly tear from their
history and syntax. Each case history struggles with the problem of
an ‘excess’ in description versus the ‘fragmentary’ account or the
‘notes’ that will embed the ‘clinical portrait’ in an explanation that
is simultaneously a history of the illness and its therapeutic recon-
struction. Where this tension is lacking, as it often is in conventional
case histories, we immediately sense the extraordinary achievement
of Freud’s own practice – so dramatic that Little Hans, Dora, Rat
Man, Wolf Man and Schreber remain alive well beyond their maker’s
reach, if not breathing life back into Freud himself.

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

It is only in French that we have the five cases in a single collection

(Freud, 1957). The first and the last, as I treat them – namely, Little
Hans (1909) and Schreber (1911) – were not analysed by Freud
since, on the one hand, it is Schreber’s Memoirs that Freud treats and,
on the other hand, Freud cooperated with Little Hans’ father in the
child’s analysis. By contrast, the analytic relation between Freud and
Dora (1900) lasted three months; between Rat Man (1909) and
Freud nine months or so; and between Freud and Wolf Man (1918)
four years on the first occasion. Freud’s family romances are now
inextricably woven into the history and politics of psychoanalysis
itself, born in a quiet room and before long flung out to make its way
among the arts and sciences of the world. The five case histories con-
stitute a great phenomenology of the family, of its unconscious phan-
tasies, its deprivations, its jealousy, its anger and murderousness. We
can no longer read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind without complet-
ing it in Freud’s phenomenology of the symptom (O’Neill, 1996c).
If the case histories remain exemplary instances of clinical practice,
it is because Freud interwove his novel histories of symptoms with a
history of their readers’ own development as clinical analysts. In each
case, Freud’s art is the same thing as Freud’s science. For nowhere else
in psychoanalysis is the patient so lively, the analyst so involved and
the reader so agitated. None of these effects is external to Freud’s
daily practice of psychoanalysis, whose discovery is simultaneously
historicized and ‘romanced’ (novelized) through them. Of course, the
case histories have provoked considerable criticism. By the same
token, they have taught us to read critically. They have done so
because they avoid any heavy-handed introduction of social, histori-
cal and political forces into the stories that are nevertheless subtly
shaped by their milieu, supposing one is sensitive to the traces that
Freud is careful to introduce into them through imagery and citation.
The case histories are family romances – tales of love and hatred in
small and larger families, where the passions intertwine with disease
and where the politics of the family interlock with a larger political
history that weighs to different degrees upon the history of that
family and the illnesses to which it is subject (O’Neill, 1996a).

The body-soul of psychoanalysis

Freud discovered that the body of hysteria has no direct perception

of itself except through the symbols of its desire. Nevertheless, these
symbols stand in no simple pattern to the body’s places. For the

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 Introduction

latter are in turn only invested with desire or revulsion in terms of a

history of relationships that the hysteric has lived more or less pain-
fully. These relations have yet to be recalled from the body’s uncon-
scious layers, its hallucinations and anaesthesia through which the
hysteric no longer has a body but is a body-soul unable to love or to
love and to marry, perhaps unable even to see or to feed itself. Such
a body is surrendered to others, repeating its infantile dependence
that cannot rearticulate itself until it has reintegrated itself in the
family romance from which it suffers and yet from where it must
reachieve its capacity for desire. Meantime, such a body may deposit
fragments of its story in a limb, a tic or an illness. But what must be
deciphered is what the body-soul is saying with its limbs or what
story is being related in the history of an illness whose onset, crises
and relapses are embedded in the patient’s domestic economy rather
than in his or her constitution. Thus the displacement of a sibling by
another sibling in the family’s affective order may be the occasion of
a ‘complaint’ that will be somatized and treated unsuccessfully (as
the complaint demands) until the story of disappointed love can be
relived with the analyst. Such is the body of psychoanalysis. It is this
body-soul whose veils are to be lifted to reveal the secret guarded by
its suffering. Psychoanalysis would otherwise have no case histories
but remain simply a diagnostic service designed to dissolve conver-
sion symptoms by whatever practical art was settled upon (David-
Ménard, 1983). Freud himself had to choose between such a
psychophysiological reduction of suffering and a psychoanalytic
retrieval of the family romance told by the suffering body whose
world is overwhelmingly inscribed upon it in cramps, coughs and
limps that conceal another scene of jouissance whose demand is
never quite forgotten but which can never again be so freely indulged
as it once was, however brief the moment before its loss.
It is the domestic body’s first romance that offers psychoanalysis its
own romance. By the same token, psychoanalysis is itself a domestic
science. Properly speaking, illness is not its object. But suffering
and ecstasy are. The domestic economy of the soul (psychischen
Haushalt), as Freud puts it, is the first theatre of psychoanalysis. Not
of course the biological body, otherwise Freud might have remained
a doctor. Fortunately, Freud’s ambition was to conquer domains as
yet unknown to medicine. Thus the body-soul of hysteria, the body
of dreams and the body of parapraxes – that is, the body-soul whose
pathologies are a puzzle to everyday life – opened to Freud a field
of inquiry in which he and his ‘lady science’ might make their for-
tune. Certainly, this body of psychoanalysis is a body of suffering.

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

But it is also a body of pleasure. It is a body where pain and plea-

sure intertwine, where each assumes the voice of the other in a
language of symptoms for which the body, its dreams and its own
speech are the primary text awaiting their translator. But this body
language is not inscribed according to any code of anatomy or of
psychology. It does not respond to the eye but to the ear. Thus it
speaks but its language is not on the same level as rational or com-
monsense discourse to which, indeed, it appears nonsensical. To
make such a discovery, Freud had to interweave thought and sexual-
ity. To make sexuality thinkable he had to discover its language.
But to do this, he had to discover where its language failed precisely
because its sexuality was unthinkable and ineffable, taking flight
into the symptom or into the dream. Otherwise Freud would
merely have added to the discourse of sexology which involves a
physical pedagogy without any psychoanalysis of the mechanisms
of desire and the unconscious which displace sexuality into the
theatre of the soul. Rather, he explored that tissue where the soul
would be converted into the somatic, producing an hysterical body
or a delirious language in place of unwanted relationships – mimick-
ing their intractability in the uselessness of a limb or the nonsense
of a verbal string which can only be unknotted on the level of the
soul’s desire. Thus in Dora’s case, or that of Rat Man, we can see
how the maternal demand (a reproach of the father) is grafted upon
the infant’s memory, its dreams and its adult conduct, so as to make
life unliveable without its legacy of suffering.
Despite the power of Lacanian readings of the case histories,
which I shall explore in Schreber’s case, I think Freud’s treatment is
less virtuoso in its achievement because it remains unable to separate
the patient’s desire from the patient’s suffering. When it does so, it
is the analyst’s desire that manifestly expropriates his patient’s desire
on behalf of his own conquest of psychoanalysis. In this respect,
Lacan’s own desire is valuable precisely because of a similar desire to
set psychoanalysis beyond the practice of its own communicants. Yet
Freud’s founding desire itself mimics in its literary body the same
process whereby the hysteric’s desire plays itself out across a body
whose communicative dynamics challenge the interpretative power
of the analyst. But in neither case is there a model upon which to
base such mimesis. Rather, there is a model of suffering and of deg-
radation but it has to be assembled from the fragments of a family
history into a personal myth that inscribes itself in the body’s sensory
modes and in the body’s peculiar language of suffering and joy. The
body’s masques are the agents that move its life on to that other

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 Introduction

stage of illness where the story of its life can only be successfully
narrated in an analysis whose own work is underwritten by the great
chorus of human suffering.
We realize that to many it will seem odd to speak of psychoanalysis
as a ‘school of suffering’ – even more so to speak of its concerns with
the ‘domestic economy of the soul’ – since it is popularly thought of
as having discovered the pervertible body of pleasure beneath the
ruins of civilized society. Yet such alternatives are hardly to be found
in Freud’s text for the very reason that the civilized inscription of the
body-soul would be impossible were it not an inextricable weave of
the pleasurable and painful, of dutiful and punishable flesh whose
response are soulful indistinguishably corporeal and spiritual. In
short, civilizations are inscribed upon bodies before those bodies
write their histories upon the stones that both celebrate and break
them. Here, too, we are faced with the same riddle of conversion
that Freud faced in trying to decipher the hysterical body. We have
constructed a culture in which the mind rules the body as our civi-
lized present rules its primitive past in its representative parental
and patriarchal figures among whom stands the physician. Thus our
medicine is likely to rule out madness or else to reduce it to a neu-
rological and reductive chemotherapy. Freud himself was not
immune to the medical chorus. But fortunately he had an ear for
mythology and the body’s own conversation in which time/space
and logic are suspended in ways he set out to discover.
It is important to try to recapture how Freud exposed himself to
the suffering of his patients without the benefit of a laboratory, a
clinic or the intermediary of a nurse and prescriptive medicines. He
met them in his home and, on the basis of a personal covenant, set
out upon a series of extraordinary voyages into the unchartered
seas of the souls of men and women in whom his own image – as
well as ours – could not fail to reflect itself. To revision the body of
illness, Freud had to pass through a stage of inventory – assigning
illness to the body parts according to the evolutionary principles of
his first ‘sexual geography’ or archaeology. Yet, Freud’s discovery of
the narrative body undermines any such localization of illness. The
narrative illness is the reconstruction of the soul’s history of the
scenes in which it was almost overwhelmed by joy and suffering
because its experience at the time could not be located according to
the dual registers of the mind and the body. In other words, Freud
discovered that his patients – and here Little Hans’ acting-out comes
to mind – interpreted their world through their bodies which has a
value that the world itself had not assigned to it but, rather, exceeds

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

it in every way. Amidst the most ordinary objects and situations,

Freud’s own hysterical body was orientated to another scene of
ecstasy which, so to speak, reconfigurated the union and separation
of its desire in the Wolf Man’s cryptology of delicious bottoms,
mountainous and milky like the moon. Surrounded by the antique
guardians of the past and the silent tapestries of the Orient, Freud
and his patients (but for Shreber who ‘texts’ him) had to learn from
each other how to remember forgotten injuries and forbidden plea-
sures that had knotted themselves together in ways that made their
lives unbearable until the day they encountered each other. Each had
to discover that their stories undid the body’s pain that their symp-
tomatologies and dream work had expressed in another register
beneath the level of consciousness and seemingly beyond language.
In discovering the psyche, they discovered the projection of the body
and the soul upon one another through the screen of desire and its
interdictions, misrecognized in conflicts that veiled the problem of
the soul’s bisexuality, its doubled love and its dream of parthenoge-
nesis in a transgression of the domestic division of our labours.

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 1
Freud’s Baby – Little Hans (1909)

The case of Little Hans – Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy

(1909) – rejuvenates psychoanalysis. It offers the possibility of seeing
in the first light of day a primal history that in the other case histo-
ries can only be inferred retrospectively and perhaps appear to be
restricted to abnormal types:
Surely there must be a possibility of observing in children at first hand
and in all the freshness of life the sexual impulses and wishes which
we dig out so laboriously in adults from among their own debris –
especially as it is our own belief that they are the common property of
all men, a part of the human constitution, and merely exaggerated or
distorted in the case of neurotics. (SE x: 6; PFL (8): 170)
Freud speaks as though his old archaeological passion had exhausted
him and as if he yearned for a renewal of his original inspiration.
After long hours among the neurotics and hysterics, digging in their
well-protected dirt, Freud imagined that an infant analysis might
open up something ‘fresh’ (Lebensfrische) to reveal the very ground
plan of human nature in the child unfolding the ‘man’, so to speak.
But of course the child is never outside of the society to which it
holds the mirror. Nor do their elders wish to see themselves in the
sexuality of their children. Yet Freud does not make enough of
Little Hans’ parents whose adherence to psychoanalysis consti-
tuted a peculiar domestic environment in which to raise Freud’s
‘fresh’ specimen. Instead, he claimed to reproduce the father’s
records quite faithfully so as to preserve ‘the naiveté and direct-
ness of the nursery’. Thus we enter a fiction based upon the nurs-
ery as the primal construct of a fresh psychoanalysis in which
human history unfolds, as if from the first light of mankind, but
which in fact unfolds in Vienna at the beginning of a century that
is itself Freud’s child.
In his essay on The Sexual Theories of Children (1906–1908), Freud
varies the imagery for achieving a fresh perspective upon human
sexuality by shifting from the side of the object to the side of the
subject of research:

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

If we could divest ourselves of our corporeal existence, and could

view the things of this earth with a fresh eye as purely thinking
beings, from another planet for instance, nothing perhaps would
strike our attention more forcibly than the fact of the existence of
two sexes among human beings, who, though so much alike in other
respects, yet mark the difference between them with such obvious
external signs. (SE ix: 211–212)
Freud’s Martian phantasy assumes that other planets than our own
might support science and yet not be inhabited by animate beings –
or perhaps that wholly scientific beings could exist whose animate
nature was not a reflexive concern and so found no expression in
sexually differentiated conduct or codes of any kind. But such a
community would not differ from the human community as viewed
by the infant ‘visitor’ since his elders would conspire not to reveal
the grounds of sexual difference despite its ubiquitous display. In
short, the taboo on gender cannot fail to put itself in question as
soon as anyone, so to speak, ‘turns up’ who doesn’t already know the
answer. Such a one is the first-born child who is, as it were, the ques-
tion that will be put sooner or later to the parents – and certainly
will be, once a second baby arrives in the family. In the Martian com-
munity the question of gender, however much it is erased by uni-
formly technical competence and scientific ideology, always threatens
to appear with the vital accidents of love and affection. The same
appears to be true in the human community. Despite the parental
conspiracy to maintain a uniform front vis à vis their children –
expressed in their common belief in the stork – emotional cracks will
appear in the parental armour. After all, they love their baby and
their baby loves them. Of course, at some point the infant will dis-
cover that the parents love one another – and even also love their
next child – so that each elder child has always to come to terms
with its emotional displacement. What is strange is that the infant
has to meet this turning point in an atmosphere of lies and deception
that creates the child’s first experience of mistrust (Billig, 1999). But
it is mistrust in ‘hir’ own family rather than towards outsiders that
sows the seed of intergenerational conflict and secrecy. It may be
that this rupture in the early Eden of the family is functional for
individuation. Even so, it is painful and risky since it may stifle both
the intellectual and emotional growth of a child troubled by its
necessary displacement in the family economy:
At the instigation of these feelings and worries, the child now comes to
be occupied with the first grand problem of life and asks himself the
question ‘Where do babies come from?’ – a question which, there can be

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 Freud’s Baby – Little Hans (1909)

no doubt, first ran, ‘Where did this particular, intruding baby come
from?’ We seem to hear the echoes of this first riddle in innumerable
riddles of myth and legend. (SE ix: 212–213)

The infant theorist is not a mythologist. Rather, it is society, in the

persons of one’s parents, that assuages infant questions with such
myths as the stork, with ready-made answers to ready-made riddles,
however unsatisfactory these myths are to children. Yet the child’s
suppression of ‘hir’ intellectual curiosity is made a condition of
acceptance – or at least of ‘good enough standing’ – in the family. But
if this were not enough to defeat the child, since ‘s/he’ can only think
‘hir’ problem with ‘hir’ own body in view of the veils around ‘hir’,
‘s/he’ must get the wrong answer. Just when ‘he’ is about to get the
idea from his own penis that the (father’s) penis must be involved in
penetrating the mother-body, his theory that his mother’s body is
phallic like his own blocks his perception of the necessary site/sight
(two into 0, won’t go!). He remains an unaccountable ‘third’ – a
puzzle to himself since girls are left out of the account for the
moment! The infant’s body also suggests to it an alternative mode of
production for babies along the lines of maternal excretion, with
‘insemination’ by paternal urination or else by means of rough and
tumble between the parents, a display of ‘affectionate aggression’
whose result is a child able now to witness such things in ‘hir’ own
case. Despite these false theories, or, rather, precisely because they
fail to uncover the mother-body, the brooding and doubting engen-
dered by the riddle of the baby furnishes ‘the prototype of all later
work directed towards the solution of problems’.
We owe our civilization to a collective myth whose unsatisfactory
nature arouses in some of us the curiosity that inspires the arts and
sciences that are the very mark of civilization and its discontents:
Hans: ‘Mummy, have you got a widdler too?’
Mother: ‘Of course. Why?’
Hans: ‘I was only just thinking.’
At the same age he went into a cow-shed once and saw a cow being
milked. ‘Oh, look!’ he said, ‘there’s milk coming out of its widdler!’
(SE x: 7; PFL (8): 171)

Here, then, we enter Freud’s nursery – no toys, no fairytales. And yet

there is a story in the making. Little Hans is thinking about his body,
comparing it with his mother’s body and with animal bodies, but
thinking the-body-with-bodies and not with fairytales or with the
usual nursery toys. There is, however, an additional presence in the

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

nursery – namely, the psychoanalytic observer (a parent, Freud) –

and despite Freud’s disclaimer of non-interference, his murmur is
continuous. It is, however, a distracted murmur. Freud is at pains to
generalize what is to be seen as ‘typical of the sexual development
of children in general’. He refers to Dora’s phantasy of fellatio (to be
considered in our next chapter) and his reduction of it to an infantile
pleasure in thumb-sucking and sucking at the nipple. This sets up
the association between the breast and udder as a breast in form and
function (mamma) but a penis by position. Freud pays no attention
to the mother’s response to Hans’ question. Does she mean to dif-
fuse Hans’ interest by implying that widdlers are so common as to
be uninteresting or is she trying to acknowledge Hans’ bodily inter-
est but to discourage his ‘theoretical’ pursuit of the question? In the
latter case her reply is fraught with trouble, for it might be taken by
Hans to mean that of course she has a widdler like his, i.e., not only
in function but in form, even though its position is not so prominent
as either Hans’ widdler or the cow’s udder. The latter difference
probably informed Hans’ question to his mother as an enquiry about
genital difference rather than similarity. In this case, the psychoana-
lytically enlightened parent had begun by blocking an original
enquiry into sexual difference and Freud seems either to have nod-
ded or else enjoyed the opportunity for a later display of his own
theoretical ability.
We have to learn to wait for Freud’s own theory. By the same
token its presentation is measured out by Freud’s odometer, i.e., the
chronology of the first five years which is the trade-mark of a
Freudian case history. Hence Strachey’s insertion of the chronology
in a note intended to help the reader ‘follow the story’:
This chronological table, based on data derived from the case history,
may help the reader to follow the story:
1903 (April) Hans born.1906 (Aet. 3–3¾) First reports.
(Aet. 3¼–3½) (Summer) First visit to Gmunden.
(Aet. 3½) Castration threat.
(Aet. 3½) October) Hanna born.
1907 (Aet. 3¾) First dream.
(Aet. 4) Removal to new flat.
(Aet. 4¼–4½) (Summer) Second visit to Gmunden. Episode
of biting horse.
1908 (Aet. 4¾) (January) Episode of falling horse. Outbreak of phobia.
(Aet. 5) (May) End of analysis.

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 Freud’s Baby – Little Hans (1909)

At three and a half, then, Hans displayed a tactile interest in his

‘member’. Finding him with his hand on his ‘penis’, his mother threatened
him in these words:
‘If you do that, I shall send for Dr. A. to cut off your widdler. And
then what’ll you widdle with?’
Hans: ‘With my bottom.’ (SE x: 7–8; PFL (8): 171)

Freud refrains from any comment upon the mother’s heavy-handed

reply in favour of a rather stilted reference to the ‘castration complex’
in The Interpretation of Dreams, other works of his and myths. He also
adds a late (1925) footnote in which he rejects any claim to the effect
that separation from the mother-body, as from the breast or in birth
or bodily loss (faeces), must be considered a constitutive element of
castration. Freud not only insists that it is the loss of the penis that is
basic to the castration fear but he also justifies his claim on the ground
of the report by Little Hans’ parents. Moreover, he leaves Little Hans’
reply quite uninterpreted. But this is because he presumes upon the
sexual interpretation of Little Hans’ touching himself – his ‘member’/
his ‘penis’ reflecting Freud’s own slippage. Although his mother’s
threat was presumably inspired by a conventional response to infant
auto-eroticism – or is it the mimicry of parental copulation? – her
words challenged Little Hans to come up with a substitute ‘widdler’.
Little Hans’ reply is kinder to his mother than is her own answer to
him, since it preserves a bottom line between them and thus a line for
continued theoretical inquiry. But Freud is unable to treat the mater-
nal body as the place of inquiry and so he moves us on to the zoo,
where Hans sees a lion’s widdler, from there to the station, where
Hans sees a steam-engine widdling, and then back home, where Hans’
comparative sexology is summarized in the finding:
‘A dog and a horse have widdlers; a table and a chair haven’t.’
Freud inserts a comment to the effect that epistemic categoriza-
tion has its roots in sexual categorization. This implies that sexual
curiosity lies at the basis of intellectual curiosity and that, in the
interests of the latter civilizational good, the sexuality of infants
ought to be fostered rather than repressed as it appears to have
been even by Freud’s model family. Even so, his parents remain the
primary objects in Little Hans’ sexual research and, at the age of
three and three-quarters, the following exchange is reported:
Hans: ‘Daddy, have you got a widdler too?’
Father: ‘Yes, of course.’
Hans: ‘But I’ve never seen it when you were undressing.’

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

Another time he is looking on intently while his mother undresses

before going to bed:
‘What are you staring like that for?’ she asked.
Hans: ‘I was only looking to see if you’d got a widdler too.’
Mother: ‘Of course, Didn’t you know that?’
Hans: ‘No. I thought you were so big you’d have a widdler like a
horse.’ (SE x: 9–10; PFL (8): 173)
At this point, Freud merely remarks that Hans’ last comment should be
kept in mind for its importance later on. But surely several things pro-
voke questions at this point? First of all, Little Hans repeats an exchange
with his father without any fear of the castration threat he experienced
with his mother. Nor is it raised. In any case, Hans was not deterred
from repeating his question to his mother. In either case, his parents’
reply contains their expectation of him that he had already observed
what they do not permit him to see, namely, the sexual differences
between themselves and between himself and his mother. Little Hans’
reply to this double bind is complex because it contains a meta-
comment on the ‘game’ of hiding the mother-body. Thus he indulges
the parental directive to conduct his sexual research upon animals
and reports his results – (of course) mummy must have a widdler and,
based upon a comparative size, it must be like a horse’s widdler!
When he was ‘exactly’ three and a half, there occurred ‘the great-
est event’ of Hans’ life – the birth of his little sister Hanna.
Apparently his father recorded his immediate response to the sounds
of his mother’s labour pains:
‘Why’s Mummy coughing? The stork’s coming today for certain.’
(SE x : 10, PFL (8) : 174)

His father comments that Little Hans’ surmise had been prepared by
the parents’ stork story and thus he had connected the unusual
groans with the stork’s arrival, even though this would have involved
an inference connecting the baby with his mother rather than the
stork, just as he understood that the tea was for her rather than for
the stork after its journey. It is quite clear that the parental story is
dismissed by Little Hans when he concludes from the blood in the
pan at the bedside that there must be some sexual difference
between himself and his mother:
‘But blood doesn’t come out of my widdler.’ (SE x : 10, PFL (8) : 174)

His father recognizes that Hans has seen right through the stork
story – ‘there can be no question that his first doubts about the stork have

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 Freud’s Baby – Little Hans (1909)

taken root’ – but he shows no insight into Hans’ task of solving a prob-
lem for which the parental advice is systematically misleading. Nor
does Freud comment on this cognitive status of the taboo at work.
Rather, we are led to focus upon Little Hans’ jealousy at the arrival of
a sister. It should be noted that we cannot decide whether Hans’
responses are to displacement, i.e., the move from the first to second
sibling position in the family, or, specifically, to displacement by a sis-
ter whose sex makes it clear that gender is at work between his par-
ents and himself. Of course, the theoretical concept of gender cannot
literally be ‘seen’ from the ‘facts’ of genital differences (sex). Nor, in a
sense, is it hidden by the parental discretion about undressing or by
their story of the stork. Human sexuality is not ‘given’ apart from the
psycho-cultural practices that interpret gender for each of the sexes.
What is exquisite for Freud’s purposes is to observe how Little
Hans’ sexological research delivers him into the hands of psycho-
analysis. Hans attempts to come to terms with his little sister by
deciding that she is indeed ‘little’ by swapping part of his own epo-
nym and assigning to Hanna the reduced part whose actual absence
constitutes ‘the difference’ between ‘Hans’ and ‘Hanna’, i.e., the
masculine and the feminine forms of the ‘same’ name:
A little later Hans was watching his seven-day-old sister being given a bath.
‘But her widdler’s quite small’, he remarked; and then added, as though
by way of consolation: ‘When she grows up it’ll get bigger all right.’
(SE x: 10: PFL 8)

Here Freud has a remarkable footnote (SE x: 11 n. 3: PFL (8): 175

n. 2). He begins by recording similar observations by two other boys
on seeing their baby sister for the first time (we have to assume that
what they saw was her ‘genitals’). Freud then expostulates to the
effect that ‘One might well feel horrified at such signs of the prema-
ture decay of a child’s intellect’, whereas he himself regards sexual
curiosity as the very origin of mental life. ‘Why was it’, he asks, ‘that
these young enquirers did not report what they really saw – namely,
that there was no widdler there?’ But shouldn’t we say what they
were looking at was a pubis. To say that they ‘saw’ that the little girl
had no ‘widdler’, meaning that she had no penis, is to identify a pos-
sible query about whether she could widdle from the pubis – as, for
example, Hans believed one could widdle from one’s bottom – with
the possible argument that anyone without a penis cannot widdle.
So far, all that Hans’ sexual research has revealed is that both his
parents have widdlers, i.e., that both have something with which to
make wiwi that – since they do not disclose it – he is obliged to

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

assume resembles his own widdler. However, this says nothing as yet
about his widdler being a penis, i.e., a mark of sexual difference.
Freud nevertheless wishes to elevate the otherwise degenerate Little
Hans into a philosopher on the ground that his ‘faulty perception’ of
a widdler where there is none was derived from his good inductive
sense, that everyone has a widdler who is a member of the class of
animate objects. Freud’s little joke, however, reveals more about psy-
choanalysis than about philosophy. Rather than say that Little Hans
‘sees’ a penis because unconsciously he cannot bear ‘not to see’ the
penis ‘there’ where he expects it and that the absent penis in the
case of the baby girl gives rise to undue anxiety about this possibility
in his own case, Freud confounds Little Hans’ ‘sexual research’ with
a number of egregious biological errors about little girls. He says that
Hans’ attribution of a little widdler to his baby sister as a response
to what he could not see was justified because in fact:
Little girls do possess a small widdler, which we call a clitoris,
though it does not grow any larger but remains permanently
stunted. (SE x; 11–12, n. 3)

Now, of course, the clitoris is not a widdler – not at all. It neither uri-
nates nor ejaculates – but, pace Freud, it does engorge. Yet it is not a
‘stunted’ penis. Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (Kirkpatrick,
1983) defines the clitoris as ‘a homologue of the penis in the female’.
Thus a clitoris is to a penis as a whale’s flipper or a bird’s wing is to a
man’s arm – ‘of the same essential nature, corresponding in relative posi-
tion, general structure and descent’! What is not said is that, although
the clitoris is not open to view, despite its ‘relative position’, its existence
is not for that reason in doubt, as would be a penis lost to its owner’s
sight! In this respect, at least, the clitoris may confer a psychic advantage
upon the female. But Freud joins Little Hans in assigning superiority to
the anxious penis on account of its ‘growth’. However dirty, little boys
are more evolved than little girls because they have something that
makes them think. Little Hans is, therefore, never as ‘little’ as his ‘little
sister’ who is condemned to the lesser part by her ‘lesser’ widdler!
Freud turns to a drawing of a giraffe made by Little Hans’ father
who reports that Hans asked him to draw it with a widdler. The
game begins again. His father tells Hans to draw it himself and the
child begins with a short stroke which he lengthened, remarking: ‘Its
widdler’s longer’. On seeing a horse micturating, Hans observed that
his widdler occupied the same relative place as his own. Watching
his sister at three months and inspecting a baby doll, he again con-
cluded that both did have widdlers, however tiny. Curiously enough,

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 Freud’s Baby – Little Hans (1909)

Freud again treats Hans as a young epistemologist concerned to

discover the category difference between animate and inanimate
objects, even though the doll is inanimate yet ‘sexed’. We do not as
yet understand why. For the sake of a joke upon philosophy, Freud
overlooks that Little Hans is concerned with sexual differences
between animate beings and not with the differences between ani-
mals and non-animals. We might also be puzzled about why Freud
says nothing about the parental conspiracy to hide from Little Hans
something they expect him to see for himself in the streets – supposing
his parents are like animals and he, in turn, is like one of them but
not the other. Rather, Freud continues with his portrait of Little
Hans by attempting to correct the ‘injustice’ done to him by empha-
sizing his auto-eroticism. To do so, however, he turns to the little
boy’s ‘love relationships’ with other children who are usually older
than himself. In these he revealed, we are told, ‘a very striking degree
of inconstancy and a disposition to polygamy’ – earned by referring
to his playmates as ‘my little girls’ – and a ‘first trace of homosexual-
ity’ earned by embracing his five-year-old cousin and saying, ‘I am so
fond of you’. While promising to correct Little Hans’ portrait, Freud
now casts him as a seemingly ‘positive paragon of all the vices’, con-
tinuing to speak of his violent ‘long range love’ for the girls he wailed
for or his ‘aggressive, masculine and arrogant way, embracing them
and kissing them heartily’.

Figure 1.1 Widdler, SE: x: 13

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

Freud makes no comment upon Little Hans’ game of playing like

the grown-ups. Rather than comment upon Hans’ mimesis of the
behaviour he observed between his parents – and which might be
connected with the puzzle about the stork – Freud prefers to toy
with Hans as an adult character in a dirty play. This game culminates
in a sequence in which, so to speak, young Hans catches the con-
science of his parents by staging a little play within that play
(repeated, incidentally, in what we may call ‘the restaurant scene’
where four-year-old Hans falls in love with an eight-year-old girl,
abetted by his father). One evening, when being put to bed, Little
Hans asked if Mariedl, could sleep with him. This being refused, he
proposed that she sleep with his parents but was told that she must
sleep with her own parents. Hans then said he would go to Mariedl
and sleep with her, at which his mother responded to his threat of
leaving his bed as follows:
Mother: ‘You really want to go away from Mummy and sleep downstairs?’
Hans: ‘Oh, I’ll come up again in the morning to have breakfast and
do number one.’
Mother: ‘Well, if you really want to go away from Daddy and Mummy,
then take your coat and knickers and – goodbye!’ (SE x: 17;
PFL (8): 180)

Thus Hans is threatened (with separation) by his mother – in the

Name-of-the-Father – as well as with castration by her earlier. Freud
remains in alliance with the parents and their ‘occasional’ practice of
having Hans in bed with them. But in remarking upon the erotic
feelings felt by any child in such a situation, Freud pictures Hans as
lying with either his father or his mother and closes his own phan-
tasy with the extraordinary piece of damaging praise:
In spite of his accesses of homosexuality, Little Hans bore himself like
a true man in the face of his mother’s challenge.

The next two incidents reveal Hans as a ‘true man’, vainly trying
to seduce his mother into handling his penis while bathing him,
although as usual she casts him off – for being ‘piggish’ – but more
successful with his understanding (‘penetrating’) father, who while
on walks assists Little Hans with unbuttoning his widdler oblivious
to the homosexual fixation he thereby establishes. Freud concludes
his ‘introduction’ to Little Hans with his father’s observations that,
by the age of four and a half, Hans had repressed his earlier exhibi-
tionism before girls and that the sight of his little sister in her bath
now provoked laughter, which he explained as follows:

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 Freud’s Baby – Little Hans (1909)

‘I am laughing at Hanna’s widdler.’

‘Why?’
‘Because her widdler’s so lovely’ (schön).

Freud leaves us with the father’s reflection upon this exchange:

‘Of course his answer was a disingenuous one. In reality her widdler has
seemed to him funny (komisch). Moreover, this is the first time he has
recognized in this way the distinction between male and female
genitals instead of denying it.’ (SE x: 21; PFL (8): 184)

Little Hans’ father next reports a change in the child’s behaviour

towards the animals in the zoo at Schönbrunn. He had begun to
avoid the giraffe and the elephant, as well as to fear the pelican but
to love small animals. His father confronted Hans with the explana-
tion that his fear of large animals was a fear of big widdlers, most
likely acquired from his inspection of horses, and he summed things
up by saying that it’s just a matter of big animals having big widdlers
and little animals having little widdlers. To this the child replied:
Hans: ‘And everyone has a widdler. And my widdler will get bigger;
it’s fixed in, of course.’ (SE x: 10: PFL (8): 196).

Here Freud explains that Little Hans’ reply was not directed by his
fear of widdlers. On the contrary they were a source of pleasurable
interest to him, but something – yet to be explained – has altered
their valence so that his sexual research had become painful to him.
Freud proposes that the castration threat made by his mother when
he was only three and a half had emerged as a ‘deferred effect’ (nach-
trägliche Gehorsam), surfacing in his anxious reference to his widdler
being ‘fixed in’, and reinforced by his ‘enlightenment’ about women’s
lack of a widdler (a shattering experience for which Freud seems to
take no responsibility, as though it were due only to the father playing
doctor). He then pictures Little Hans having to resist the fact that it
is possible to be an animal without a widdler, namely, not a man but
a woman (Weib). Little Hans resisted this fact of life because, in view
of the castration threat, it would mean that he himself could be
‘made’ into a woman.

Case history and analysis of a phobia

Freud restarts the case history with the father’s report that Little
Hans had developed a nervous disorder – a fear that a horse will bite
him in the street. His immediate fear of the horse’s large penis, which
Little Hans had also assigned to his mother, apparently had deeper

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

roots in ‘sexual overexcitation due to his mother’s tenderness’, as his

father surmised. In any case, Freud sets aside the immediate conjunc-
tion of question and answer for a longer inspection of the evidence.
But he says nothing about the father’s compliance with his wife’s
behaviour despite his complaint that Hans has begun to set them a
riddle (Rätsel) so early in his life! At four and three-quarter’s age,
Hans woke one morning in tears. The reason he gave was:
‘When I was asleep I thought you were gone (fort) and I had no
Mummy (Mammi) to coax with (Schmeicheln = liebkosen).’ (SE x: 23;
PFL (8): 186)

Strachey’s ‘coax with’ is strange and, I suggest, better translated as

‘pet’, since what is involved is Little Hans’ return as well as receipt
of his mother’s fondling and also, I believe, his exchange of ‘sweet
talk’ learned from the parents. But whenever he reflected so
mournfully upon the possibility of being without a mother – or
that his father would go away – his mother always took him into
her bed. We might notice that the child ‘elegist’ has shifted the
parental Fort/Da from the vision of their comings and goings to
the experience of the possession of the mother at the expense of
the father’s permanent loss. Little Hans’ fear that he would be bitten
by a horse when out in the street could only be consoled by being
‘petted’ by his mother. In the meantime he had also told his
mother, while in bed with her, that his Aunt who had seen her
bathing him had said:
‘He has got a dear little thingummy (ein liebes Pischl).’

to which Freud adds a note, saying that such sweet talk in respect of
children’s genitals was a common practice. Little Hans also confesses
to his mother that, despite her prohibition, he put his hand on his
widdler every night.
Freud argues that we must keep apart Little Hans’ horse phobia
and his anxiety over losing his mother and the petting they enjoyed.
Hans’ basic condition is to be seen in his enormous affection for his
mother, in his attempts to seduce her and in the admiration of his
penis bestowed by his aunt and again offered to his mother. The pos-
sibility that he might lose his mother’s loving, which occurred to
him while he was away from her, is sufficient to arouse anxiety with-
out any connection to the horse phobia. This is only confirmed by
her practice of taking him into her bed, especially when his father
was not with them at the vacation home. Now Hans’ anxiety per-
sisted even when he was with his mother. The puzzle here can only

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 Freud’s Baby – Little Hans (1909)

be understood if we posit that repression has set in, but his longing
remains and thus his anxiety must shift from the mother’s possible
loss to the fear of being bitten by a horse. So where did the horse
phobia come from? Is the horse a substitute for the mother as sug-
gested by Little Hans’ comparison between their widdlers? But then
we cannot understand his fear that the horse might come into his
room at night. If we dismiss this as something foolish, we merely
hide our ignorance behind our cleverness. But the language of neu-
rosis is never foolish. Nor can we play the family doctor jumping on
to Little Hans’ masturbation as the cause of his anxiety. That is too
easy. In the first place anxiety does not arise from masturbation but
precisely from the attempt to break the habit which, after enjoying
it for more than a year, is just what Little Hans was trying to do. It
should also be said in defence of his mother that while she might be
blamed for being too affectionate she would also be blamed for
threatening her child.
Freud decides with the father that Little Hans should be told that
the horse story was ‘silly’ and that what he really wanted was to be
taken into his mother’s bed. His fear of horses was caused by his
excessive curiosity about widdlers, which he realized was not quite
right. He also suggests that the father ‘enlighten’ his child on sexual
matters so far as to tell Little Hans that, as he could see from Hanna,
his mother and, indeed, all females had no widdler (Wiwimacher).
He was to pass off this information at a suitable opportunity offered
by one of Hans’ questions.
A month having passed, Little Hans resumed his walks but with
a compulsion to look at horses in order to be frightened by them
whereas earlier his fear had prevented the sight of them. After an
attack of influenza which kept him in bed for two weeks, the ear-
lier phobia returned and became worse after another period in bed.
But it had become a fear of having his finger bitten by a white horse.
His father suggests that it is not the horse but his widdler Hans was
not to touch. Hans insists that widdler’s don’t bite. (Freud notes
that the child’s expression for ‘I’m itching’ (in the genitals) is ‘it
bites me’.) Hans and his father persist in trying to explain the horse
phobia in terms of the child’s masturbatory behaviour, the father
apparently not having talked to Little Hans on the subject of
woman’s lack of a penis. But the moment of ‘enlightenment’ did
offer itself on a quiet Sunday walk in Lainz, when Little Hans
thanked God for getting rid of horses. His father seized on the
moment to tell him that neither his sister nor his mother, nor
women generally, have a widdler:

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

Hans: (after a pause): ‘But how do little girls widdle, if they have no
widdlers?’
I: ‘They don’t have widdlers like yours. Haven’t you noticed
already, when Hanna was being given her bath?’ (SE x: 31; PFL
(8): 194)
Although this news seemed to cheer Little Hans for a while, he soon
produced a dream in which his masturbatory act was accompanied by
the sight of his mother’s widdler. Freud’s comment implies that Hans
had refused to abandon his single widdler theory despite his mother’s
threat and perhaps because the child had other reasons to doubt his
father’s story. But nothing is made of Hans’ puzzlement about how
women urinate if they don’t have a widdler like little boys. The adult
story makes no distinction between urination, masturbation and copu-
lation. Thus the ‘infant’ is caught in the attribution of a precocious
sexuality at a stage where the urinary ritual or mysteries may be all
that is at stake for the infant theorist. Even Freud’s recommendation
that Little Hans be informed that little girls have no widdler
(Wiwimacher) encourages the puzzlement over what it is they have to
make ‘wiwi’ if they have nothing in their hand when they widdle.
From the father’s report we consider next Little Hans’ giraffe
dream and his father’s efforts to work it through with his son:
In the night there was a big giraffe in the room and a crumpled one;
and the big one called out because I took the crumpled one away from
it. Then it stopped calling out; and then I sat down on top of the
crumbled one. (SE x: 37; PFL (8): 199)

The father interprets this as a phantasy played out between the ani-
mals (there were pictures of a giraffe and an elephant over Hans’
bed) but which in fact represented Little Hans’ ability to get past his
father’s protests against his being taken into bed by his mother
whose genitals he wished to fondle. Freud adds that, in addition to
his idea of possessing the mother by sitting upon her, the dream
reveals Little Hans’ ‘triumph’ (Sieg) over his father’s failure to pre-
vent him from possessing his mother, although he probably feared
that his mother did not like him because his widdler was ‘no match
for’ (Strachey has ‘not comparable to’) his father’s widdler. But still
they were no closer to explaining the horse phobia, until on a visit
to Freud’s office it occurred to Freud to ask ‘jokingly’ whether the
horses wore eye-glasses. Hans said, ‘no’. But when asked if his father
wore glasses – which he did – he also said ‘no’. Freud then asked him
whether ‘the black around the [horse’s] mouth’ referred to his
father’s moustache, suggesting that it was his father whom he feared

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 Freud’s Baby – Little Hans (1909)

precisely because he was so fond of his mother. He confirmed that

Hans had no need to fear his father who loved him because his
father ‘knew long before he came into the world’ that Little Hans
would love his mother and fear his father because of it. But the
father interrupted Freud, asking why Little Hans was angry with him
since he had never scolded or hit him. Hans reminded him that he
had been clipped by his father after he had butted him in the stomach.
Yet Freud ignores the symbolism or meta-comment in the blow to
the stomach in order to enjoy Little Hans’ query about whether
Freud could foretell things from talking to God. Freud’s pleasure in
hearing this from the mouth of babes and sucklings might well have
filled him with pride had he not first suggested Hans’ reply in his
playful brag. In any case, from this time on the father supervised
Hans in terms of prearranged advice from Freud.
The father’s report continues to be based upon his own interpreta-
tive line that he is the horse that Little Hans fears because – even
though he loves his father – he wants exclusive possession of his
mother. This was the blissful state he had enjoyed every time the
coach came to take his father away on a business trip:
‘Daddy, don’t trot away from me!’
I was struck by his saying ‘trot’ instead of ‘run’, and replied:
‘Oho! So you’re afraid of the horse trotting away from you.’
Upon which he laughed. (SE x: 45; PFL (8): 207)

His father then reports in some detail, even providing a sketch of the
site from where Hans could observe the comings and goings of the

Warehouse

Loading Dock

Carts
Courtyard Entrance Gates
Railings Street
(Untere Viaductgasse)

Our House

Figure 1.2 Warehouse (SE x: 46)

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

carthorses, and he notes specifically that Hans’ fear arose with the
larger carts (Wagen) – their starting up, their speed and their turns to
enter or exit the warehouse of the Office for the Taxation of Foodstuffs.
He suggests Little Hans’ fear of the movement of the carthorse is
an expression of a desire to be left alone in possession of his mother
while he himself is away. With the aid of a sketch he treats Hans’ fear
of the carts moving off while he was trying to jump from them on
to the loading dock where he wanted to play by stacking the boxes
as a ‘symbolic substitute for some other wish’ that ‘the Professor’
would likely better understand. Further questioning reveals that the
carthorses most feared by Little Hans were those with a ‘black thing’
on their mouths:

Figure 1.3 Horse head (SE x: 49)

He was most afraid that the horse pulling very heavy loads would fall
down, ‘making a racket (Krawall) with its feet’, and perhaps be dead.
Freud concurred with the father in seeing behind the diffuse horse
phobia a wish for the father’s death, but leaves us to wait for the
significance of the fallen horse’s legs thrashing in the air.
Little Hans began to play at being a horse himself and even to
stamp his feet like a horse – something he had done whenever he
was angry or had to do potty rather than play or when he had to
widdle. So far things seem to be bogging down and Freud anticipates
his reader’s boredom by claiming that this trough in the analysis will
be followed by a peak that Little Hans is just about to reveal. Hans’
next episode involves his mother’s ‘drawers’ (knickers) which throw
him into a fit, spitting on the floor. His father tries to match the ‘yellow’
knickers to the yellow turds (lumpf) in an earlier episode. But Little
Hans is just as upset by ‘black’ knickers. The puzzle related to his
mother allowing him to accompany her to the toilet where he
enjoyed seeing her lower her knickers to make lumpf. Hans continues
to identify with horses and relates some games of cart and horse with
the other children in which he often played ‘horse’ and was disturbed

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 Freud’s Baby – Little Hans (1909)

by the expression ‘cos of the horse’ (Wegen dem Pferd) in which he

heard the word ‘cos’ (Wegen) as ‘cart’ (Wagen). Freud does not per-
sue the association with Magen (the stomach) yet Hans had butted
his father in the stomach earlier, perhaps mimicking what he took to
be his father’s way of treating his mother’s stomach to make babies.
The mother and father, of course, go together like a horse and cart.
The puzzle is ‘how?’ – especially if the horse goes before the cart!
But Little Hans seems to sense that the cart may, after all, go prop-
erly before the horse – to get its load. Returning to the inquest on
his mother’s knickers, Little Hans’ behaviour, in particular his reac-
tion of ‘spitting’ (Spucken, Speien) with its overtones of ejaculation
or vomiting, remains without comment, although it reveals his mim-
icry of the parental secret. Here Freud sacrifices Hans’ combination
of research and acting out in favour of his own dramaturgy in which
he speaks of Hans as ‘masking’ himself in the whole affair of the
knickers in order to hide his pleasure with professions of disgust. In
this connection, Hans offers the following explanation:
‘I spit because the black drawers are black like a lumpf and the yellow
ones like a widdle, and then I think I’ve got to widdle’. (SE x: 63; PFL
(8): 224)
Hans’ father pursues his questioning. But this reveals little more
than that Hans associated the ‘racket’ (Krawall) – remember the
racket made by the horse’s feet and by himself stamping – of flush-
ing the toilet with lumpf and the trickle with widdling. Freud inter-
venes to inform the reader that the father is getting nowhere because
he asks too many questions.
On the eleventh of April, Little Hans entered his parents’ room
and was sent out as usual. He later reported:
‘Daddy, I thought something. I was in the bath, and then the plumber
(Schlosser) came and unscrewed it. Then he took a big borer (Bohrer)
and stuck it into my stomach (Bauch)’. (SE x: 65; PFL (8): 226)
Along this line, Hans also remembered his displeasure at having to
take baths sitting or lying instead of kneeling or standing. Under
questioning he explains his fear that his mother might let his head
go under the water but his father guesses that it is probably his sister
Hanna upon whom he wished that fate. Later on, Hans expressed his
fear that Hanna might fall from the balcony which had such big gaps
in it – they had to be filled with wire – apparently the unpractical
design of a Secessionist metal worker (Schlosser)! His mother gets
him to admit that he would rather not have a sister. It then becomes
clearer that Hanna is the ‘lumpf’ with which he is obsessed. More

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

precisely, he has been looking everywhere – in bags, boxes, carts and

in the toilet to see where babies come from since the stork story
never convinced him. His recollection of Hanna being laid in bed
beside her mother at birth also comes to mind, giving a better sense
to his own desires than the prevailing insinuation that his motives
are primarily incestuous, coupled with murderous feelings towards
his father. Freud himself remarks that Hans was puzzled by the rid-
dle of life and death but, of course, it is his own theory that has yet
to root this riddle in the Oedipus story.
Meanwhile Little Hans continues with the phantasy of their jour-
neys with Little Hanna in a box (Kiste) drawn by a horseman or
himself riding the horse while Hans and his mother sit in the coach
(Broser, 1982). The story, of course, puzzles his father all the more
as he attempts to find his own place in it by identifying with the
horse. At this point Freud suggests that the box-phantasy is to be
treated as a comment upon the stork story:
‘If you really expect me to believe that the stork brought Hanna in October,
when even in the summer, while we were travelling to Gmunden, I’d
noticed how big Mother’s stomach was, – then I expect you to believe my
lies’. (SE x: 70–71; PFL (8): 231, author’s emphasis)
Hans and his father explore various inconsistencies in the stork story –
essentially how the stork must not be seen by anyone when he brings
the baby into the house, or down the chimney, into its crib or into
the mother’s bed. Having let things run to this point – with the
father receiving a right ‘drubbing’ (frotzeln) – Freud confesses that he
had neglected to tell him that Little Hans would persue his sexual
research in terms of his infantile theory of anal birth and hence his
excremental interests would reflect his equation of lumpf with
babies and their origin. Thus Freud is himself to blame for the
father’s failure so far to unravel his son’s case. There follows a long
exchange between the two in which Little Hans reveals to his father
his desire to beat his mother on the bottom (Popo) as she used to
threaten to do with him – presumably another device to see if he can
knock out of her the secret of pregnant (gravide) women and not
simply an expression of sadism. The latter accusation is too strong I
believe for the context of Little Hans’ sexual research and its frustra-
tions. It is interesting to note that the term gravide (pregnant) closely
resembles Gradiva, the lady of the light step – virginal and of course
not pregnant, but who in turn reminds us of Freud’s vision of his own
mother’s slim figure (at least between pregnancies). By the same
token, much of Little Hans’ fear and anger at his father represents his

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 Freud’s Baby – Little Hans (1909)

efforts – despite the stork story and his father’s protestations that he
had never given Hans cause for anger – to fit his father into the
‘pregnancy complex’ (Graviditätskomplex).
Little Hans is obliged to try to crack the secret of life any way he
can so long as his parents withhold the facts of life for which he
seems to be ready. The more they withhold his sexual enlighten-
ment the more he parodies presumptive versions of how it must be
the parents expect him to make his discovery. Thus he combines
direct surgery with the chicken-and-egg story by cutting open a
rubber doll to inspect its insides and relating the story of how he
pretended to be a chicken before the other children at Gmunden
and how they had looked for the egg and found a Little Hans! But
still Little Hans remains in the dark as to whether his sister Hanna
belongs to him, to his mother or to his father. To be told that she
belongs to all of them – but to remain unenlightened about the
nature of sexual relations and of the female genitals – only leaves
him in the dark. So finally his parents explain to him ‘up to a point’
that children grow inside their mummies and come into the world
by being pressed out ‘like a lumpf’, but painfully. Little Hans
responds by taking the other tack with all sorts of questions to get
out of the father his role in making babies. Once again the parental
myth fends off these questions by answering that mummies and
daddies only have babies if God wants a baby. Again Little Hans
retreats into his phantasy of being a mother with little children lest
they displace him and the lovely time he had experienced as his
mother’s first-born. Similarly, in his fascination with the loading
and unloading of boxes he had acted out his infantile theory of
how babies got out of their mother while also overlaying this game
with his hypothesis on faecal birth. But one day, after having
claimed so long that he was the mother of his own little children
(his playmates), he told his father that it was his mother who was
their mother while his father was their grandfather, adding that one
day he would grow up and have children like his father and his
mother would be their grandmother:
The little Oedipus had found a happier solution than that prescribed
by destiny. Instead of putting his father out of the way, he had granted
him the same happiness that he desired himself: he made him a grand-
father and married him to his own mother too. (SE x: 98; PFL (8): 256)
Having resolved the oedipal riddle as a law of intergenerational
reproduction, Little Hans then produced two further phantasies to
bring his own plumbing into line with his sexual future:

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

The plumber came; and first he took away my behind (Podl) with a pair
of pincers (Zange), and then he gave me another, and then the same
with my widdler (Wiwimacher). (SE x: 98; PFL (8): 257)
A few days later, Little Hans’ mother wrote to express to Freud
her joy (Freude) at Little Hans’ recovery. A week later his father
added a postscript pointing to several minor matters but emphasiz-
ing how violent the anxiety attacks had been so that they could not
have been handled by sending him out with a good thrashing.
Overall, his anxiety seemed to have displaced itself into a disposition
to ask questions as to how things were made but he still remained
puzzled about the relation between a father and his son. To this
Freud adds that in the ‘plumber phantasy’ Little Hans had indeed
resolved the anxiety due to the castration complex. But for the rest
this young researcher had only discovered, however early, that ‘all
knowledge is a patchwork’ and that every solution leaves behind it
an unsolved remainder.

Putting the cart before the horse

Freud’s concluding analysis of the case materials consists of an

extended ‘discussion’ in Part III organized from three points of view.
The first consists of an intertextual exercise which cannot be ade-
quately understood without a knowledge of Three Essays on Sexuality
(1901–1905). Freud claims to test his earlier findings against the
case of Little Hans and we must pay particular attention to Freud’s
conduct of his own case. In the second exercise, he evaluates the
contribution of the case materials to a general understanding of pho-
bic behaviour. And in the final evaluation, he considers what light
the case of Little Hans can throw upon child behaviour in general
and the pedagogical practices of the day.
On the first count, Freud considers the present case to have
accorded very well with his earlier findings. But, rather than consider
to what extent this reveals a persistent bias in his theoretical per-
spective, he instead devotes himself to setting aside the objections
that Hans is a ‘degenerate’ child – that the analysis reveals nothing
more than Freud’s ‘prejudices’ instilled through the father into a sug-
gestible child. He replies that these arguments rely upon too vague
a sense of what is at work in ‘suggestion’ as well as involving a stere-
otype about the impressionability of children. He considers that
there is no great difference between children and adults since,
whether they lie or tell the truth or if they phantasize too freely,
what is relevant psychoanalytically is the weight of this behaviour in

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 Freud’s Baby – Little Hans (1909)

the total economy of their experience which functions to produce

internal checks and balances upon particular phases of reported
experience:
The arbitrary has no existence in mental life.

Thus it is not possible to decide upon the total character of either

the child or the adult from elements of behaviour that, at a given
stage, appear bizarre or perverted but which may be found to have
occurred in anyone’s life history and to have a significance that can
only be determined by means of a case history analysis. Of course,
the discovery of the unconscious means that a split will occur
between what is said and what is thought by the patient. This, how-
ever, is not a matter of deliberate deception. It is, rather, the very
mark of mental life involving, as it does, unconscious processes. The
latter, in turn, are necessary experiences that destine us for life in
society. They are, so to speak, the stuff of family life out of which
each of us has to come to terms with a ‘given’ sexuality whose mean-
ing has nevertheless to be acquired or ‘learned’, as we can see from
the case of Little Hans.
As to the objection that it was necessary to tell Little Hans things
well beyond his own capacity of expression, Freud replies that this
is a limitation that lies in the very nature of a neurosis inasmuch as
it involves turning away from the ‘other’ person. As a result, the
patient cannot work through for himself what ‘we’ want him to real-
ize unless we intervene in the materials he presents to us in order to
direct him towards the unconscious processes whose recognition
may produce a reduction of his conflict. Freud, therefore, concedes
the interference effect but answers that it is required by the very
nature of the effort to cure:
For psychoanalysis is not an impartial scientific investigation, but a
therapeutic measure.

He remains adamant that even though Little Hans had to contend

with two slightly uncoordinated analysts he nevertheless independ-
ently articulated the plumber phantasies and the ‘lumpf’ puzzles
proper to his own sexual development around the ‘castration com-
plex’. But he sets aside any further appeal with the observation that
it is useless to try to convince those who are not already persuaded of the
objective reality of unconscious processes – a decision made in the
‘pleasant knowledge’ that their number is on the increase. So Freud’s
infant science, now sure of its own legs, confidently turns its back
upon its scientific ‘other’ in order to explore its own turf.

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 The Domestic Economy of the Soul

Once again Freud reconstructs Little Hans’ preoccupation with

widdlers as due to his hypothesis that the presence of a widdler is
what differentiates animate creatures from inanimate objects, with
variations in the size of the widdler corresponding to the relative
size of the creature. Hence grown-ups and large animals have big
widdlers. Yet Freud says nothing to differentiate the urinal from the
genital function of the widdler. In that case, little Hanna and her
mother could be seen to widdle even if their urethra does not issue
in a penis. By the same token, he overdetermines Little Hans’ inter-
est in his ‘widdler’ by not pointing to the joint urethral and ejacula-
tory functions of the ‘penis’. Here is a sexual difference that is not
the whole of the difference between the sexes. But by ignoring
such distinctions, he casts Little Hans in the role of a sexually pre-
cocious child. Little Hans risks ‘homosexuality’ at one turn and
‘polygamy’ at another at a time in his life when he is ignorant of
the copulatory function between the sexes but not of the auto-
erotic effect of lying with his parents. Freud indulges the dramatic
irony of casting Little Hans as a ‘sexual researcher’ who consoles
himself with masturbation until he has unlocked the riddle of
human sexuality. While one cannot entirely abstract the sexual
question from the predicament of being sexed, the latter surely
predisposes the infant to raise the ontological question ‘Where do
babies come from?’ without simultaneously posing the sexological
question ‘How do parents copulate?’ To separate the two questions
entirely would be to deny the unconscious relationship between
them. But in reconstructing that relationship care must be taken
not to project knowledge (guilt, perversion) that can only have
been an after-effect. Indeed, this is the very essence of Freud’s dis-
covery of the Nachträglichkeit, i.e., the ‘deferred’ action whose his-
tory calls for the reconstructed stages of sexual development in the
child. Part of the point here is that the ‘good enough’ parent (ana-
lyst) will know not to overlay the baby question with the sexual
question until it is time. Yet Freud preferred to violate his better
knowledge for the sake of improving the interest of his little stories.
Here as elsewhere he sacrifices clinical precision to theatrical or
literary effect. Thus when he speaks of Little Hans as having
expressed to his parents his ‘regret’ that he had never yet seen their
widdlers, Freud projects Little Hans into an adult mood of reflec-
tion upon an (im)possible experience – as though what had been
missed was never having seen Niagara Falls – or else a wish that, on
being confessed, might have been readily granted. Having indulged
this effect, he tries to redeem it with an argument that all Little

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Other documents randomly have
different content
of our own day. It was a wild kind of football, played on these
commons, often with a hundred players aside, and we are told that
the roughest kind of Rugby football was child's play compared with
it. If stories of old camping contests be true, it might almost seem
that in ascribing the thinly-populated condition of Norfolk and Suffolk
to the long-standing effects of the Black Death, and to mediæval
insurrections and their resulting butcheries, we do an injustice to
pestilence and the sword, and fail to make count of the casualties
received in play. As the wondering Frenchman said, in witnessing a
camping-match, "If these savages be at play, what would they be in
war?"
"These contests," says a Norfolk historian, "were not infrequently
fatal to many of the combatants. I have heard old persons speak of
a celebrated camping, Norfolk against Suffolk, on Diss Common,
with three hundred on each side. Before the ball was thrown up, the
Norfolk men inquired tauntingly of the Suffolk men if they had
brought their coffins. The Suffolk men, after fourteen hours, were
the victors. Nine deaths were the result of the conflict in a fortnight."
Camping went out of favour about 1810, and the coroners had an
easier time.

XXXVI
Dickleburgh, the next village after Scole, is in its way as imposing a
place, only not an inn, but a church, is its chief feature. The great
church of Dickleborough (as the name should be pronounced)
charmingly screened from the street by a row of limes, but not so
charmingly enclosed by a very long and very tall iron railing, stands
end on to the road, its eastern wall looking down upon the pilgrims
who once passed on their way to Our Lady of Walsingham; two
tabernacles, one on either side of the east window, holding effigies
of popular saints, and halting many a sinner for supplication. The
saints are gone, torn down by Henry the Eighth's commissioners, or
by the fanatical Dowsing. They lie, perhaps, in the mud of some
horse-pond, or, broken up, serve the useful part of metalling the
road. Adjoining the church stands the "King's Head," the sign
perhaps rather a general idea of kings than intended as a portrait of
any particular one. At any rate it resembles none of the long line of
English sovereigns, nor even that one-time favourite, the King of
Prussia, though old enough to have been painted in the hey-day of
his popularity. Dickleburgh Church is absurdly large for the present
size of the place and for the empty country side; but there is a
reason for the solitudes, and there was one for these huge buildings,
ten times too large for the present needs of the shrunken villages.
Norfolk and Suffolk, once among the most thickly-peopled of English
counties, were practically depopulated in 1348 by that dreadful
scourge, the Black Death. One-third of the total population of
England perished under that terrible plague. The working classes
were the worst sufferers, and the agriculturists, the weavers and
labourers died in such numbers that the crops rotted on the ground,
industries decayed, and no man would work. When the pestilence
was stayed, other parts of the country flourished in greater
proportion, than this. Manufacturing industries arose elsewhere and
attracted the large populations; while East Anglia, remaining
consistently agricultural throughout the centuries, has never shared
the increase; only the few and scattered towns showing industrial
enterprise, in the form of weaving in mediæval and later times, and
in the manufacture of agricultural machinery nowadays. In the last
two decades, with the decay of agriculture and the rush of the
peasantry to London and the great centres of population, the
country, and the eastern counties in especial, has become almost
deserted.
 DICKLEBURGH.
The present state of agriculture in Eastern England is made manifest
in deserted farms, in broken gates left hanging precariously on one
hinge, in decaying barns and cart-sheds left to rot; rusted ploughs
and decrepit waggons standing derelict in the once fertile fields, now
overrun with foul weeds and rank with docks, charlock, and thistles;
and farms, long advertised "to let," remaining and likely to remain
tenantless. Not to everyone is it possible to grow seeds and flowers,
and market-gardening is profitable only in the lands more
immediately surrounding the great towns. With wheat at its present
price of thirty shillings a quarter, it does not pay to grow corn for the
market, and the land is going out of cultivation. Where the farmer
still struggles on, he lays down most of his holding in grass for sheep
and cattle, and grows, grudgingly, as little wheat as possible, for
sake of the straw. Things are not quite so bad as in 1894, when
wheat was down to twenty shillings a quarter, and farmers fed their
pigs on the harvest which cost them three pounds more per acre to
grow than it would have brought in the market; but at thirty shillings
it yields no profit. Agricultural England is, in short, ruined, and there
seems no present hope of things becoming better. While the
boundless, bountiful harvests of Argentina, of Canada, the United
States, Russia and other wheat-producing countries can be
cultivated, reaped, and carried to these shores at the prices that
now rule, and while the stock-breeders of those lands can raise
sheep and cattle just as advantageously, the English farmer must
needs go without a living wage. As matters stand at present, we
import fully seventy-five per cent. of the wheat used in the country;
the acreage under corn having gone down from 4,058,731 acres in
1852, to about half that at the present day. Meanwhile the
population has increased by thirteen millions; so that, with many
more mouths to fill, we grow only half the staple food these islands
produced then. There are, of course, those who reap the advantage
of cheap corn and cheap meat from over seas. The toiling millions of
the towns and cities thrive on those benefits; but what if, through
war, or from any other cause, those sea-borne supplies ceased? Of
what avail would have been this generation of cheapness if at last
the nation must starve? Extinguish agriculture and the farmer, and
you cannot recall them at need, nor with magic wand bring back to
cultivation a land which has long gone untilled.
But the farmer cannot alone be ruined, any more than the walls of a
house can be demolished and the roof yet left standing. It was the
farmer who in prosperous times supported the country gentleman in
one direction, and the agricultural labourer in the other. With wheat,
as it was a generation ago, at seventy shillings a quarter, and other
products of the land proportionately profitable, the farmer could
afford to pay both high rent and good wages. Farms in those days
were difficult to obtain, and there was great competition among
farmers for holdings. To-day, even at a quarter of those rents,
tenants are difficult to obtain, and the income of the landed
proprietors has dwindled away. The results are painfully evident
here, in the old families reduced or beggared, and their seats either
in the market or let to stock-jobbers and successful business men,
while the old owners have disappeared or live humbly in small
houses once occupied by the steward or bailiff of the estate.
While rents have thus, with the iron logic of circumstances, gone
down to vanishing-point, and while farms have actually been offered
rent free in order to prevent the disaster of the land being let go out
of cultivation, the wages and the circumstances of the agricultural
labourer have been, most illogically, improving. Instead of the
miserable six to nine shillings a week he existed upon, at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, he receives thirteen or fourteen
shillings, lives in a decent cottage, instead of a wretched hovel, and
finds the cost of food and clothing fifty per cent. cheaper than his
grandfather ever knew it to be. Yet agricultural labourers are as
difficult to get now as they were immediately after the Black Death
had swept away three quarters of the working class, five hundred
and fifty years ago. The crops went ungarnered then, as they have
done of recent years in East Anglia—for lack of hands to gather
them in. It was in 1899 that standing crops at Tivitshall St
Margaret's and adjacent parishes were sold by auction for a farmer
who could find no labourer willing to be hired.
What has been called the "rural exodus" is well named. London and
the great towns have proved so attractive to the children of the
middle-aged peasant that they despise the country. They can all
read and write now, and at a pinch do simple sums in arithmetic; so
off they go to the crowded streets. The ambitious aspire to a black
coat and a stool in an office, and others become workmen of many
kinds; but all are attracted by the higher wages to be earned in the
towns, and by the excitement of living in the great centres of
population, and only the aged and the aging will soon be left to till
the fields.
Farmers entertain the supremest contempt for the agricultural
labourer's attempts to better himself. To them they are almost
impious; but the farmer is himself tarred with the same brush of
culture. He is a vastly different fellow from his grandfather, who
actually helped to till the soil among his own men; whose wife and
daughters were noted hands at milking and buttermaking; who lived
in the kitchen, among the hams and the domestic utensils, and was
not above eating the same food as, and at the same table with, his
ploughmen and carters. He has, in fact, and so also have the landed
proprietor and the labourer, undergone a process of levelling up. It is
a process which had started certainly by 1825, when Cobbett noticed
it.
Hear him:—

"When the old farmhouses are down (and down they must
come in time) what a miserable thing the country will be! Those
that are now erected are mere painted shells, with a mistress
within who is stuck up in a place she calls the parlour, with, if
she have children, the 'young ladies and gentlemen' about her;
some showy chairs and a sofa (a sofa by all means); half-a-
dozen prints in gilt frames hanging up; some swinging book-
shelves with novels and tracts upon them; a dinner brought in
by a girl that is perhaps better 'educated' than she; two or three
nick-nacks to eat, instead of a piece of bacon and a pudding;
the house too neat for a dirty-shoed carter to be allowed to
come into; and everything proclaiming to every sensible
beholder that there is here a constant anxiety to make a show
not warranted by the reality. The children (which is the worst
part of it) are all too clever to work; they are all to be
gentlefolks. Go to plough! Good God! What! 'young gentlemen'
go to plough! They become clerks, or some skimming-dish thing
or other. They flee from the dirty work as cunning horses do
from the bridle. What misery is all this! What a mass of
materials for proclaiming that general and dreadful convulsion
that must, first or last, come and blow this funding and jobbing
and enslaving and starving system to atoms."

The "convulsion" anticipated by Cobbett has not come about. This is

not a country of earthquakes or of violent social upheavals. Free
Trade has beggared the agricultural interests, but, on his way to the
Bankruptcy Court, the farmer contrives to live in better style than
possible three quarters of a century ago, while his pretensions to
gentility certainly have not decreased. As for the "funding and
jobbing," Cobbett could never, in his wildest dreams, have foreseen
Limited Liability and the fungoid growth of Stock Exchange
speculation, or the modern "enslaving and starving system" of the
gigantic Trusts that, like vampires, feed on the blood of industry. We
need look for no convulsions; not even, unhappily, for the hanging,
or, at least, the taxing out of existence, of the millionaires. Our
expectations of the future are quite different. The people will inhabit
the towns, and the country will become a huge preserve of game for
the sport of the millionaires aforesaid; a preserve broken here and
there by the model farm or the training establishment of some
colossus of wealth.

XXXVII
Beyond Dickleburgh, past the solitary "Ram" inn, a fine, dignified
house still lamenting its decadence from a posting-inn to a
beerhouse, Tivetshall level-crossing marks where the railway runs to
Bungay and Lowestoft. Maps make Pulham St Mary the Virgin quite
near, with Pulham St Mary Magdalene close by; Tivetshalls of
different dedications, and other villages dotted about like plums in a
Christmas pudding, but no sign of them is evident. Only windmills,
whirling furiously on distant ridges, break the pastoral solitudes. In
this conflict of charts, a carter jogging along the road with his team
is evidently the authority to be consulted.
"Coom hather," says the carter to his sleek and intelligent horses;
and they coom accordingly, with much jingling of harness, and stand
in the shade of roadside trees while their lord takes his modest
levenses and haffles and jaffles—gossips, that is to say—with the
landlord of the "Ram."
"Tivetshall?" asks the carter, echoing a question; "niver heerd of un."
Then a light breaks in upon him. "Oh, ay! Tishell we allus call 'em;
Tishell St Marget an' Tishell St Merry," and with, a sweep of the arm
comprising the whole western horizon, "Theiy'm ower theer."
"And Pulham St Mary the Virgin?"
"Pulham St Merry the Wirgin? oh, yis! Pulham Maaket, yar mean,
bor. Et edd'n on'y a moile, ower theer"—a comprehensive wave to
the eastwards.
And there, on a byroad, in an embrace of trees, it is found, a little
forgotten town, the greater proportion of whose inhabitants appear
to walk with two sticks. It is ranged round a green or market-place,
with a great Perpendicular church, gorgeously frescoed within, and
with a very good recent "Ascension" over the chancel arch, painted
and stencilled timber roof, and elaborate stained-glass windows. The
townlet and townsfolk sinking into decay, the church an object of
such care and expense, afford a curious contrast.
An old toll-house and the prison-like buildings of Depwade Union
conspire to make desolate the road onwards. He who presses, hot-
foot, along it, turning neither to the right nor to the left, may readily
be excused a legitimate wonder as to what has become of the great
feature of East Anglia, its spreading commons; for, strange to say,
despite the fame they have long since attained, no vestige of them is
glimpsed from the road itself. One has usually to turn aside to some
of the villages lying near, but wholly hidden from the highway, to
find the yet unenclosed common lands, the pasturage of geese,
ducks and turkeys; but a striking exception to this now general rule
is the huge common of Wacton lying off to the left of the road at the
hundredth mile from London, where a cottage and a wayside inn,
the "Duke's Head," alone represent Wacton village, a mile distant.
Wacton Common, reputed to be the highest point in Norfolk,
although of no less extent than three hundred and fifty acres, might
perhaps be passed without being seen, for the reason that, although
still wild and unenclosed, it is screened from the high road by a
hedge and entered through an ordinary field gate. The inn and the
cottage, obviously built on land fraudulently taken from the common
in the long ago, serve with their gardens to hide that glorious
expanse of grass and heather. Here roam those chartered
vagabonds, the plump geese, that pick up a living on the grassy
commons and wander, like free-booting bands of feathered moss-
troopers upon the heaths, closing their careers with royal feasting in
the August and September stubble, and a Michaelmas martyrdom.

A DISPUTED PASTURAGE.
Norfolk and Suffolk are still famous for their geese, but those
martyred fowls do not make their final journey to the London
markets, between Michaelmas and Christmas, with the publicity they
once attained. They go up to Leadenhall nowadays in the seclusion
of railway vans. Seventy years ago they journeyed by coach, and in
state, for the Norfolk coaches in Christmas week often carried
nothing save geese and turkeys, beside the coachman and guard.
Full inside and out with such a freight, the proprietors of fast
coaches made a great deal more by carrying them than they would
have taken by a load of passengers; so the fowls had the
preference, while travellers had to take their chance of finding a seat
in the slower conveyances. So long ago as 1793 the turkeys
conveyed from Norwich to London between a Saturday morning and
Sunday night in December numbered one thousand seven hundred,
and weighed 9 tons, 2 cwt. 2 lbs. Their value was £680. They were
followed on the two succeeding days by half as many more.
A Norfolk common without its screaming and hissing flocks of geese
would seem strangely untenanted. They, the turkeys, the ducks, the
donkeys ("dickies" they call them in Norfolk) and the vagrom fowls
are among the only vestiges of the wild life that once made Norfolk
famous to the naturalist and not a little eerie to the traveller of old,
who, startled on the lonely way that stretched by heath and
common and fen between the habitations of men, shrank appalled at
the lumbering flight of the huge bustards, quivered with
apprehension at the sudden hideous whirring of the night-jar as the
day closed in, dismayed, heard the bittern booming among the
reeds, or with misgivings of the supernatural saw the fantastical ruff
stalking on long legs, with prodigious beak, red eyes and spreading
circle of neck feathers, like the creation of some disordered
imagination. Wild Norfolk, the home of these and of many another
strange creature, is no more, and these species, now chiefly extinct,
are to be seen only in museums of natural history.
 LONG STRATTON.
What Wacton lacks along the high road the village of Long Stratton
has in superabundance. They named it well who affixed the
adjective, for it measures a mile from end to end. Beginning with
modern and (to speak kindly) uninteresting cottages, it ends in a
broad street where almost every house is old and beautiful in
lichened brick or soft-toned plaster. Midway of this lengthy
thoroughfare stands the church, one of the Norfolk round-towered
kind, in the usual black flint, and beyond it the Manor House, red
brick, with Adam scrolls and neo-classical palm branches in plaster
for trimmings, set back at some distance behind a very newty,
froggy and tadpoley moat. Beyond this again, the village street
broadens out. Looking back upon it, when one has finally climbed
uphill on the way to Norwich, Long Stratton is a place entirely
charming. Its name, of course, derives from its situation on the
Roman Road, and Tasburgh, that now comes in sight, keeps yet its
Roman camp strongly posted above the River Tase. Tasburgh—what
little there is of a village—occupies an acclivity on the further side of
that river, across whose wide and marshy valley the mists rise early,
seeing the sun to bed dull and tarnished, and attending the rising of
the moon with ghostly vapours. The old Roman camp is oddly and
picturesquely occupied by the parish church, another round-towered
example. Excepting it, the vicarage and the Dutch-like building of
the "Bird in Hand" Inn, there is little else.
 LONG STRATTON.

But what mean these sounds of anger and lamentation that drown
the soothing, distant rattle of reaping machines on the hillside: a
voice raised in reproach, and another—a treble one—in gusty shrieks
of combined pain, fear and peevishness? Coming round a corner, the
cause of the disturbance is revealed in a wet and muddy infant
rubbing dirty knuckles into streaming eyes, and being violently
reproached by an indignant woman.
"You're a pretty article, I must say; a fine spettacle. I'll give yow a
good sowsin', my lord; coom arn;" and the malefactor is pulled
suddenly inside the cottage, the door slammed, and muffled yells
heard, alternating with thumps. The offender is receiving that
sowsing, or being "yerked," "clipped over the ear-hole," getting a
"siseraring," being "whanged" or "clouted," the striking Norfolk
phrases for varieties of assault and battery.

XXXVIII
The Tase is met with again on surmounting the hilly road out of
Tasburgh and coming down hill into Newton Flotman. Here it is
broad enough to require a long and substantial bridge, grouping in
unaccustomed rightness of composition with the mingled thatched,
tiled and slated cottages and the church that stands on a
commanding knoll in the background. When Newton was really new
it would be impossible to say; perhaps its novelty may have been
measured against the hoary antiquity of, say, Caistor yonder, down
the valley. For what says the folk-rhyme:—

"Caistor was a city when Norwich was none,

And Norwich was built of Caistor stone,"

and if Norwich partook of Caistor's building materials, why not, in

degree, Newton Flotman? But a whisper. Caistor was never more
than a camp, and not at any time a place of houses, much less of
stone ones. Stone is not to be found in this neighbourhood, and flint
only, of which Norwich is principally built, is available for building
materials.
 TASBURGH.

One object in Newton Flotman that puzzles the passing stranger is a

little effigy of Bacchus fixed on the wall of the "Maid's Head" Inn, so
thickly covered with successive coats of paint that it is difficult to
give it a period. Remains of Roman antiquities are so many in this
district that it is often mistaken for a work of that classic age, when
it can really claim no higher antiquity than that of the late eighteenth
century, a time when figures of the kind were a usual decoration of
inn signs. Such an one still swings from the wrought-iron sign of the
"Angel" at Woolhampton, on the Bath Road.
In the woody valley of the Tase beyond Newton Flotman lies
Dunston, trees casting a protecting and secretive shade over it, and
the "Dun Cow" Inn its only roadside representative. That inn and the
circular brick pound for strayed sheep and cattle redeem the last few
miles into Norwich from absolute emptiness. When the pound last
was used who shall say? The tramps have played havoc with it, and
its wooden gate has gone. The ancient office of pound-keeper is
here evidently fallen into disuse.
Swainsthorpe's octagonal church tower is seen on the level to the
left, but Caistor, in like manner with Dunston, is sunk deep in foliage,
half a mile or more away in the valley, its church tower rising like a
grey beacon from amid the trees, to tell the curious where its
ancient camp may be found. Caistor St Edmunds, to give its full
name, is the site of the great Roman camp established here to
overawe the stronghold of the Iceni, four miles away on the banks of
the Wensum, and now the site of Norwich.

NEWTON FLOTMAN.
Caistor camp is a really satisfactory example of a Roman fortified
castrum. For one thing, it has the largest area of any known relic of
its kind in England, enclosing thirty-seven acres. If its fragments of
flint walls have neither the thickness nor the height of those at
Portus Rutupiæ, the old Roman port in Thanet, now known as
Richborough, its deep ditch and massive embankment assist the
laggard imagination of the layman in matters archæological, which
refuses to be stirred before mere undulations in the sward. Here is a
ditch that can be rolled into, an embankment that can be climbed
and paced on three sides of the camp, if necessary, to put to
physical test both height, depth and extent. The fourth side of this
great enclosure, now a turnip-field, was bounded by the River Tase
and was sufficiently defended by that stream, then a wide creek, so
that no works are to be found there. How long it was before the
Romans subdued the Iceni, whose great city is thought to have
stood where Norwich does now, is not known. Nothing of that early
time here, indeed, is known, and guesses are of the vaguest. Only it
seems that the Roman advance into East Anglia, which had for its
objective the principal stronghold of the tribes, here came to its
military ending. To compare things so ancient and romantic with
others modern and thought prosaic, the several Roman camps on
the advance from London now to be sought at Uphall near Romford;
Chipping Hill, near Witham, Lexden, and Tasburgh, are, with those
that have disappeared, to be looked upon in the same light as the
wayside stations on the railway to Norwich, a railway which originally
came to a terminus at that city, and was only at a later date
continued northward.
 THE OLD BRICK POUND.

Where the Romans and the Romano-British citizens of Venta lived

when the tribes were reduced—where the Venta Icenorum of Roman
rule really was, in fact—is a mystery, for, unlike most of our great
cities, Norwich has furnished no relics of that age; while, beyond
coins and odds and ends, Caistor camp has produced nothing. No
vestiges of streets or houses have been found, here or elsewhere,
and Venta might, for all there is to show of it, have been a city of
dreams. The fact that the original capital of the Iceni was re-settled
by the Danes when they came in a conquering flood, seems to point
to the site of it having long been deserted; and that they called it
after the North "wic" or creek, presupposes a "South wic"
somewhere else, near or far. The position of that south creek is fixed
by the ancient geography of these last few miles. In those times the
ground on which Yarmouth, at the mouth of the Yare estuary, is now
built, was under the waves of the sea, which ran up in a long
navigable creek—the "Gariensis" of the Romans and the "North Wic"
of the Danes—from a Roman fortified port where Caistor-by-
Yarmouth stands, to the site of Norwich, which indeed, centuries
later, was still a port. Where the River Tase is now confluent with the
Yare and the Wensum, there then branched out a shorter and
perhaps shallower creek, running almost due south; the "South wic"
of those northern pirates. At its head stood Caistor, where the
navigation ceased.

CAISTOR CAMP.
It is far inland now, but the marshy valley of the Tase still bears
signs of those old conditions, and perhaps the villas of wealthy
Roman citizens, together with other relics of the vanished city, still
lie preserved deep down in the mud and silt that have filled up the
old channel.
The lie of the land, in accord with these views, is plain to see when,
returning to the high road, the journey to Norwich is continued to
Hartford Bridge; bird's-eye views unfolding across the valley to the
right. At Hartford Bridge, where there are several bridges, none of
them sizeable, rivers, streams and runlets of sorts trickle, flow, and
gurgle in their different ways through flat meadows, below the long
rise where, two miles from Norwich, the road begins to grow
suburban. It is on the summit that the Newmarket and Thetford
route from London joins with this, and together they descend into
the city.

XXXIX
This way came Queen Elizabeth into Norwich on her great "progress"
of 1578, by St Stephen's Plain and through St Stephen's Gate. Gates
and walls are gone that once kept out the turbulent, or even
condemned the belated citizen to lodge the night without the
precincts of the city, in suburbs not in those times to be reckoned
safe.
Norwich long ago swept away her defences and modernised her
outskirts, for this is no Sleepy Hollow, this cathedral city in the valley
of the Wensum, but the capital of East Anglia, throbbing with
industry and in every way in the forefront of modern life. To the
entrance from London Norwich turns perhaps its most unattractive
side. No general view of the city, lying in its hollow beside the
winding Wensum, opens out, and the eye seeks the cathedral spire
and finds it with some difficulty, modestly peering over tangled
modern roof-tops. It is from quite the opposite direction, from the
noble height of Mousehold Heath, that Norwich unfolds itself in a
majestic picture of cathedral, churches and houses, with trees and
gardens, such as no other city can show, displayed within its
bounds. Norwich does not jump instantly to the antiquarian eye, and
its electric tramways that are the first to greet the traveller who
enters from the old coach road are not a little forbidding. The city
grows gradually upon the stranger in all its wealth of beauty and
interest, and becomes more and more lovable the better he
becomes acquainted with it.
Until these railway times, in the old days of slow, difficult, dangerous
and expensive travelling, the capital of East Anglia was in a very high
degree a capital, and sufficient to itself. Its shipping trade and
weaving industries, and the famous Norwich School of artists,
brought this exclusive attitude down from mediæval times to
modern; and Norfolk county families until the era of political reform
had almost dawned, still had their "town houses" in Norwich, just as,
in bygone centuries, that typical old family, the Pastons, owned their
town houses in Hungate and in what is now called King Street,
formerly Conisford Street.
The coaches coming to Norwich threaded the mazy streets to inns
widely sundered. The original "Norwich Machine" of 1762 traversed
the greater part of the city, to draw up at the "Maid's Head," in
Tombland. On the other hand, the Mails, the "Telegraph" and the
"Magnet," came to and started from the "Rampant Horse" in the
street of the same name, standing not far from the beginnings of the
city. The street is there still, but the oddly-named inn has given place
to shops, and where the "Rampant Horse" ramped rampageously, in
violent contrast with the mild-mannered "Great White Horse" of
Ipswich, drapers' establishments now hold forth seductive
announcements of "alarming sacrifices."
Among other coaches, "Gurney's Original Day Coach" and the
"Phenomenon" favoured the "Angel," in the Market Place, while the
"Times" house was the "Norfolk Hotel," in St Giles's, and that of the
"Expedition" the "Swan" Inn. Other inns, many of them huddled
together under the lee of the castle mound, were then to be found
in the Market Place and the Haymarket and in the narrow alley in the
rear that still goes by name of "Back of the Inns." Others yet, many
of mediæval age, are to be sought in old nooks of the city. The
Pilgrim's Hostel, now the Rosemary Tavern, like the "Old Barge,"
belongs to the fourteenth century, the last named still standing
between King Street and the river, with a picturesque but battered
entrance. The steep and winding lane of Elm Hill, where the slum
population of Norwich stew and pig together down ancient courts
and dirty alleys, has more inns, ramshackle but unrestored; and in
the wide open space by the cathedral, dolefully called Tombland,
although it has not, nor ever had, anything to do with tombs, is the
"Maid's Head," the one establishment in Norwich that stands pre-
eminently for old times and good cheer. It is an "hotel" now, and has
the modern conveniences of sanitation and electric light; but its
restoration, effected through the enthusiasm of a local antiquary,
with both the opportunity of purchasing the property and the means
of doing so, has been carried through with taste and discrimination.
The "Maid's Head" can with certainty claim a history of six hundred
years, and is thought to have been built upon the site of a former
Bishop's Palace. Heavily-raftered ceilings and masonry of evident
antiquity may take parts of the present house back so far, or even a
greater length, but the especial pride of the "Maid's Head" is its
beautiful Jacobean woodwork. The old sign of the house was the
"Molde Fish," or "Murtel Fish," a name that antiquaries still boggle
at. It was long a cherished legend that this strange and unlovely
name was changed to the present sign in complimentary allusion to
Queen Elizabeth when she first visited the city, but later researches
have proved the change to have been made at least a century
earlier, and so goes another belief!
The "Music House," facing the now disreputable King Street, has not
for so very long been an inn. Its name tells of a time when it was
the meeting-place of the "city music," old-time ancestors of modern
town bands, but its story goes back to the Norman period, when the
crypt that bears up the thirteenth-century building above was part of
the home of Moyses, a Jew, and afterwards of Isaac, his nephew.
"Isaac's Hall," as it was known, was seized by King John and given
to one of his creatures; the unhappy Israelites doubtless, if they
were allowed to live at all, finding cool quarters in the castle
dungeons. A long succession of owners, including the Pastons,
followed; last among them Coke, afterwards Lord Chief Justice, who
resided here in 1633.
It has already been hinted that the streets of Norwich are mazy.
They are indeed the most perplexing of any town in England. Many
roads run into the city, and from every direction. Glancing at a plan
of it, these roads resemble the main strands of a spider's web, and
the streets the cross webs. In midst of this maze is the great castle,
like the spider himself; that cruel keep in whose dungeons old
wrong-doing, religious and private spite, have immured many a
wretched captive, like that unfortunate unknown "Bartholomew,"
who has left his name scratched on the walls, and the statement
that he was here confined "saunz resun," a reason of the best in
those times. Did he ever see the light of day again? Or did some
midnight assassin murder him as many another had been done to
death?
"Blanchflower," that Bigod, Earl of Norwich who built the castle
called his keep when it arose on its great mound, its stone new and
white. He built upon the site of a castle thought to have been Saxon,
and built so well that it became a fortress impregnable save to
famine and treachery. It has, therefore, unlike weaker places that
have been stormed again and again, little history, and even seven
hundred years ago was little more than a prison. And a prison of
sorts—for State captives first, and for common malefactors
afterwards—it remained until so recently as 1883, when it was
restored and then opened as the Museum and Art Gallery it now is.
This is no place to speak at length of the cathedral that withdraws
itself with such ecclesiastical reserve from the busy quarters of the
city, and is approached decorously through ancient gateways in the
walls of its surrounding close; the Ethelbert Gate, with that other,
the Erpingham Gate, built in Harry the Fifth's time by Sir Thomas
Erpingham, whose little kneeling effigy yet remains in its niche in the
gable over the archway, and whose motto—variously held to be
"Yenk," or "Think,"—"Denk," or "Thank"—is repeated many times on
the stone work. Norman monastic gloom still broods over the close,
for the cathedral, save the Decorated cloisters and the light and
graceful spire in the same style, is almost wholly of that period, and
the grammar school that was once a mediæval mortuary chapel and
has its playground in the crypt, keeps a gravity of demeanour that,
considering its history, is eminently proper.
Through the Close lies the way to Bishop's Bridge and the steep road
up to Mousehold Heath: the "Monk's Hold," or monastic property, of
times gone by when it was common land of the manor belonging to
the Benedictine priory.

XL

NORWICH, FROM MOUSEHOLD HEATH.

Here, on this famous Heath of Mousehold where the gorse and
heather and the less common broom yet flourish, despite the electric
tramways that bring up the crowds and the picnic parties, Nature,
rugged and unconquerable, looks down upon the city, revealed as a
whole. Even though the chimneys of great factories may intrude and
smirch the sky when winds permit the smoke-wreaths to trail across
the view, it is a view quite unspoilable. The cathedral, as is only
proper, is the grand dominating feature, with its central tower and
graceful crocketed spire rising to a height of 320 feet. Second to it,
on its left hand, the huge bulk of the castle keep rears up; a time-
ball on its battlements to give the time o' day to the busy citizens;
those battlements where from a gibbet they hanged Robert Kett in
1549, when his rebellion was crushed and his army of 20,000
peasants who had encamped on Mousehold defeated. In similar
fashion his brother William was hanged from Wymondham steeple.
Between castle and cathedral the great tower of St Peter Mancroft
looms up, and on the other side of the cathedral tower the twin
spires of the Roman Catholic place of worship crown the sky-line. To
the extreme right of the accompanying illustration is St Giles's, and
on the extreme left, in company with the pinnacled tower of a
modern church, the dark tower of St John-at-Sepulchre, Bracondale,
which for shortness and simplicity the citizens call "Ber Street
Church." For the rest, it is a mingling of town and country, of houses
and gardens and churches in great number, that one sees down
there; old Norwich, in short, exclusive of the modern suburbs that
are flung everywhere around and cause the Norwich of to-day to
outnumber the Norwich of coaching times by 80,000 inhabitants. It
must be evident from those figures that the picturesque old Norwich
numbering a population of only 30,000 has been in great degree
improved away and borne under by that human deluge. It is
delightful now, but what it was at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, when Crome and De Wint and others sketched and painted
its quaint bits, the picture-galleries of the Castle Museum can tell.
Nay, even down to the mid-nineteenth century it was still very
different, as a collection of early photographs in the castle proves.
Then, before St Peter Mancroft was restored, before the old Fish
Market was cleared away, Norwich had many more quaint nooks
than now to show the stranger; even as, centuries before, it was yet
more quaint and even more remarkable for its many churches than
at the present time.
"The nearer the church the further from God," says the old saw.
How irreligious then should Norwich be, that has even yet a
cathedral and thirty-four ancient churches, and modern places of
worship fully as numerous! Let the citizens, therefore, as old Fuller
suggested, "make good use of their churches and cross that
pestilent proverb." These churches bear a close resemblance to one
another, having nearly all been rebuilt in the Perpendicular period,
some five hundred years ago, and all built of the black flint that
gives a character to East Anglian architecture quite distinct from that
of other districts. The time when they were thus rebuilt was not only
a great period of church-building throughout England, but a time of
especial prosperity in mercantile and trading Norwich; a time when
guilds grew powerful and merchants wealthy in the flourishing
industry of cloth-weaving introduced some time earlier by Flamand
and Hollander immigrants. English wool that before had gone across
the narrow seas for manufacture into stuffs was now weaved in the
land of its growth. "Many thousands," says Blomefield, "that before
could not get their bread could now by this means live handsomely."
In that age, to become rich and prosperous was to become also a
founder and benefactor of churches; hence the great ecclesiastical
buildings that, according to the picturesque metaphor of an old
writer, writing when there were no fewer than sixty-one churches in
the city, "surrounded the cathedral as the stars do the moon." The
old citizens sleep in the parish churches for which they did so much;
their monuments in brass or marble, stone or alabaster curiously
wrought, often with their "merchant's marks"—the distinctive signs
with which they labelled their wares—engraved on them in lieu of
coats of arms. It is as though a modern trader were to have the
registered trade-mark of his speciality engraved on his tombstone. A
typical memorial of an old Norwich trader is that of Thomas
Sotherton, in the church of St John Maddermarket. He—

"Under this cold marbell sleeps,"

and was no common fellow, mark you, but

 "Of gentell blood, more worthy merrit,
Whose brest enclosed an humble sperryt."

NORWICH MARKET PLACE.

Although the calendar of saints is a long one and more than
sufficiently lengthy to have provided each one of the Norwich
churches with a patron, yet so popular were some saints, that
several churches to the same one are found in Norwich, as seen also
in the city of London. As in old London, it was in those cases
necessary to confer surnames, so to speak, upon those churches.
They are surnames of the geographical sort and not a little curious.
The four St Peters are, for example, St Peter Mancroft, the largest
and most important in the city, so called from the Magna Croft, or
large field of the castle; St Peter per Mountergate, in King Street,
named from the road by the "montem," the hill or mount, that runs
ridge-like in its rear; St Peter Hungate, the "hundred gate," or road,
reminiscent of the time when Norwich was a hundred of itself, even
as it is now by itself a county; and St Peter Southgate. St Michael-at-
Thorn has still thorn trees growing in its churchyard; St Michael
Coslany, with St Mary's of identical surname, was built in Coast Lane;
and St Michael-at-Plea was named from its neighbourhood to an
ecclesiastical court. St John Maddermarket is thus distinguished from
other St Johns—St John Timberhill and St John-at-Sepulchre. In the
neighbourhood of the first-named, madder for the dyers' use was
marketed; while at Timberhill was the market in wood. St Martin-at-
Palace, by the old Bishop's Palace, and St-Martin-at-Oak take up the
tale, which might be continued at great length.

NORWICH SNAP.
The business life of modern Norwich centres in the Market Place and
the streets that immediately lead out of it: the mouldering signs of
old commerce peer in peaked gables, clustered chimneys and old
red-brick and plastered walls in the lanes and along the wharves of
the Wensum.
There trade hustles and elbows to the front, in many-storeyed piles
of brick, stone and stucco, with great show of goods in plate-glass
windows and bold advertisement of gilt lettering. All those signs of
prosperity may be seen, and on a larger scale, in London, but not
even in London are the electric tram cars so great a menace to life
and limb as in these narrow and winding streets, where they dash
along at reckless speed.
The Market Place is not yet wholly spoilt. The huge bulk of St Peter
Mancroft and a row of queer old houses beside it still avert that
disaster, and form a picture from one point of view; while the flint-
faced Guildhall stands at another corner of the great open place and
in its Council Chamber, in use five hundred years ago as a Court of
Justice, and still so used, proves the continuity of "our rough island
story." In a dark and dismal cell of the Guildhall once lay the heroic
martyr, Thomas Bilney, who "testified" at the stake in the Lollards'
Pit, where many another had already yielded up his life. He
wondered, as others before and after him had done and were to do,
whether the tortured body could pass steadfast through the fiery
ordeal; and on the eve of his martyrdom put that doubt to the test
by holding his finger in the flame of a candle. That test sufficed, and
he suffered with unshaken constancy when the morrow dawned.
The Guildhall has less tragical memories than this, and was indeed
the scene of many old-time municipal revelries in times before
Corporations became reformed. But old revels and frolics have been
discontinued, and "Snap," the Norwich dragon, a fearsome beast of
gilded wickerwork, who was wont to be paraded from the Guildhall
at the annual mayoral election, and last frolicked with his attendant
beadles and whifflers in 1835, now reposes in the Castle Museum.
The Market Place on Saturday, when the wide open square is close-
packed with stalls, is Norwich at its most characteristic time and in
its most characteristic spot. In it the story of the Norwich Road may
fitly end. The city itself, glanced at in the immediately foregoing
pages, could not yield its story in less space than that occupied by
that of the road itself.
 INDEX
Aldgate, 1, 8, 11, 13, 51
---- Pump, 11

"Bacon End," 180

Boreham, 127-129
Bow, 6, 8, 75-80
---- Bridge, 77-79
Brentwood, 23, 94-99, 132, 200
Brockford, 257
Brome, 261
Brook Street, 94
---- Hill, 94, 132

Caistor St Edmunds, 4, 298, 301-303

Capel St Mary, 236
Chadwell Heath, 51, 83, 85, 86
---- Street, 86
Chelmsford, 5, 40, 51, 52, 54, 57, 80, 114-121, 127, 167, 200
Chipping Hill, 133-139, 302
Claydon, 252
---- Hall, 252
Coaches:--
"Confatharrat," 34
"Duke of Beaufort's Retaliator," 46, 140
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