father and child had often played horses, with Hans riding on his fathers back that it indicated further that Hans saw his father to resemble a horse. Hans said that the time his phobia began was when he saw the horse collapse as it gave him such a fright but Freud and Hans father ignored the plausible explanation and believed that Hans wanted to bed his mother and saw his father to be a rival. However it was actually the mother who made the threats of castration not the father. One day she said if you do that (touch his penis) I shall send for doctor X to cut off your widdler. And then what will you widdle with? (Mother, Gross, p601). Even so, this is a classic example of a good, psychoanalytic analysis used to make sense of behaviour, but is a story, the truth of which can never be confirmed. It can never be confirmed because it has an awful lot of criticisms and it is Freuds only case study on a child that supports the oedipal theory. Freud needed some evidence to support his theory and it seems he had already made up his mind what was wrong with little Hans and interpreted the data to fit what he believed (experimenter bias), also Hans father originally made the Psychoanalysis, as he was a big follower of Freuds theory, and the two men conferred on the situation. So Hans would have been susceptible to his fathers suggestions, it was very difficult because they were emotionally involved, making it hard for the father to be objective about the situation and in actual fact Freud himself only ever met the boy on one or two occasions. It is a shame really, because without the criticisms the interpretation of the phobia would have been quite feasible. Freud also found some examples of the Oedipus complex in adults, of whom he psychoanalysed. One of these was a female patient who had an erotic attachment to her father, which Freud said, started before her puberty. She said that she was far too ill to marry but Freud said that he...
