1915

A child’s intellectual interest in the riddles of sex, his desire for sexual knowledge, shows itself accordingly at an unexpectedly early age. If it has not been possible to make observations such as I am now going to put before you more frequently, that can only be because parents are either afflicted with blindness in regard to this interest on the part of their children, or, because, if they cannot overlook it, they at once take steps to stifle it. I know a delightful little boy, now four years old, whose understanding parents abstain from forcibly suppressing one part of the child’s development. Little Hans has certainly not been exposed to anything in the nature of seduction by a nurse, yet he has already for some time shown the liveliest interest in the part of the body which he calls his ‘widdler’. When he was only three he asked his mother: ‘ Mummy, have you got a widdler too?’ His mother answered: ‘Of course. What did you think?’ He also asked his father the same question repeatedly. At the same age he was taken to a cow-shed for the first time and saw a cow being milked. ‘Oh look!’ he said, in surprise, ‘there’s milk coming out of its widdler!’ At the age of three and three quarters he was on the way to making an independent discovery of correct categories by means of his observations. He saw some water being let out of an engine and said, ‘Oh, look, the engine’s widdling. Where’s it got its widdler?’ He added afterwards in reflective tones: ‘A dog and a horse have widdlers; a table and a chair haven’t.’ Recently he was watching his seven-day-old little sister being given a bath. ‘But her widdler’s still quite small’, he remarked; ‘when she grows up it’ll get bigger all right.’ (I have been told of this same attitude towards the problem of sex distinction in other boys of similar age.) I should like to say explicitly that little Hans is not a sensual child or at all pathologically disposed. The fact is simply, I think, that, not having been intimidated or oppressed with a sense of guilt, he gives expression quite ingenuously to what he thinks.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] The history of little Hans’s later illness and recovery is described in my ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (1909b).