CARL PLETSCH
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medical journal not directly associated with the psychoanalytic
movement. In late 1902 and 1903 , the first meetings of what was to
become the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society were held in Freud's
waiting room, and in 1908 the first "international" meeting of
psychoanalysts was held in Salzburg. At this meeting the decision
was made to publish a psychoanalytic periodical to give the group its
own forum. Thus in 1909 Freud was able to publish his next two
case histories in the first two numbers of the
Jahrbuch jur
psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen .
These were his
reports on the cases commonly known as Little Hans,
Analysis oj a
Phobia in a Five- Year-Old Boy,
and the Rat Man,
Notes upon a Case oj
Obsessional Neurosis .
They were clearly aimed at a newly emergent
readership of psychoanalysts.
The case of Little Hans especially gives the impression of a
contribution
entre nous.
The raw materials for the report were
supplied by the little boy's parents, who were, according to Freud,
"among my closest adherents." Freud said he had "for many years
been urging my pupils and my friends to collect observations of the
sexual life of children" in order to compare such data to hypotheses
about early sexual life derived from the analysis of adults, such as
those he had published in the
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905) . The case of Little Hans was the most obvious fruit of this
request. There were important theoretical reasons for sharing this
case with psychoanalysts. Freud acknowledged that although the
hypotheses in the
Three Essays
might seem incontrovertible to the
uninitiated,
even a psycho-analyst may confess to the wish for a more direct
and less roundabout proof of these theorems. 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 also our 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.
Here we see that although Freud continued to regard the case study
as inferior to theoretical formulations, he accorded it an important
role in the confirmation of hypotheses, i. e., in the validation process.
He also seemed no longer worried about the fact that this was only
one
case.
Working now in the context of what he was later to call "the
psychoanalytic movement," Freud discovered another use for the
