The “Return of Totemism in Childhood”: Freud and Ferenczi on Children and Animals

In 1913, the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi reported the case of a three-year-old boy named Árpád who during a holiday with his parents in an Austrian spa developed a strange affection for chicken:

After the family's return to Budapest, the boy started to talk again, but almost exclusively of chickens and invented various macabre games that all turned around the killing of poultry and playing with their body parts. The torturing and slaughtering of chickens put him into a state of intense excitement that culminated in ecstatic dances around the animal corpses. Living roosters, however, created great anxiety in him.

Within the report, the psychoanalytic explanation is soon disclosed by little Arpád himself who relates that a rooster or capon had pecked at his penis and maybe bitten him when he tried to urinate in the fowl-house. According to the boy's account, the chambermaid had then rescued him, bandaged the imaginary or real wound and cut off the bird's head. Ferenczi concluded that the anxiety was linked to the “castration complex” triggered by the adult interdiction of infantile masturbation that is usually accompanied by threats of cutting off the boys' penis and that the rooster symbolized the father. The child's intense interest in the fowl-house was explained by the fact that he could peek into all the firmly kept family secrets here at leisure: “the ‘helpful animals’ shewed him in an unconcealed way everything he wanted to see, especially the continued sexual activity between cock and hen, the laying of eggs, and the creeping out of the young brood” (ibid., 250). The mimetic relationship with the animals that had worried the parents so much, then, was interpreted in terms of identification with the father, an identification marked by strong emotional ambivalence. While the strangeness of the case was now tamed by a reassuring theoretical explanation, Ferenczi's eponymic title preserved it: “Ein kleiner Hahnemann” (A Little Rooster Man in literal translation, or “A Little Chanticleer”).

Ferenczi's note appears in many ways as a rough version of the Oedipus complex that Freud had just turned into the “schibboleth” of psychoanalysis.Footnote ¹ As the correspondence between the two men reveals, the case was clearly constructed as a counterpart to Freud's case history of “Little Hans,” published in 1909, which turns around a young boy's phobic reaction to horses. Ferenczi thought his “sensational case” to be “significant enough to be a brother of ‘Little Hans’” (Ferenczi to Freud, 18 January, 1912, in Freud and Ferenczi Reference Freud, Ferenczi, Brabant, Falzeder, Giampieri-Deutsch and Hoffer1992, 330). Moreover, the little Rooster Man seems to be the first case where the title performs a fusion of a patient with the animal that is at the center of his infantile sexual interests, a coinage suggested by Freud to Ferenczi who adopted it as a title for his piece (Freud to Ferenczi, January 23, 1912, in Freud and Ferenczi Reference Freud, Ferenczi, Brabant, Falzeder, Giampieri-Deutsch and Hoffer1992, 330). Freud's cases of the “Rat Man” and the “Wolf Man” became certainly the most famous instances of this practice, although these popular titles appeared only in print with Strachey's Standard Edition in the 1950s.Footnote ²

In comparison, Ferenczi's case of the “Little Rooster-Man” could appear as obscure, had it not been assigned a strategic position by Freud in his grandiose attempt to construct an anthropological basis for the Oedipus complex in Totem and Taboo. In the fourth essay on the “return of totemism in childhood,” “little Hans” and “Árpád” figure prominently in a general discussion of animal phobias and their relations with the totemism of “primitive societies” (Freud Reference Freud1913, 126–32). Whereas the animal phobia of little Hans provided Freud with evidence for the reapperance of certain features of totemism in a negative form, Ferenczi's case seemed to be an “instance of positive totemism in a child” (ibid., 130; emphasis in the original). In other words, while little Hans was presented as a typical case of infantile neurosis, little Árpád offered Freud the clinical picture of a “poultry perversion” (ibid., 132) thereby confirming once again that the neuroses are “the negative of the perversions” (Freud Reference Freud1905, 165; emphasis in the original). Via the interpretation that the respective animals represented the father, both cases should render the hypothesis probable that the totemic system – with its two major taboo prohibitions, not to kill the totem animal and not to have sexual intercourse with a woman from the same totem group – was an outcome of the Oedipus complex.

The child, the animal, and the primitive man occupy a strategic position in this anthropological turn of psychoanalytic theory, because they all seemed to allow an uncensored observation of the “primal”:

As this passage implies, the close relationship the child can have with certain animals is rooted in the still uninhibited expression of the instincts. Freud's famous characterization of infantile sexuality as “polymorphously perverse” finds its most basic and primary justification in such “disregarding of the barrier of species (the gulf between men and animals)” (Freud Reference Freud1916–17, 208). In this context, it has to be noted that the successful dissolution of the Oedipus complex is taken to be the result of the manifold contradictions and frustrations encountered by the infant during his or her sexual researches. For one of the distinctive marks of Freud's theory of sexuality is the presentation of the child as a theorist of the acts and speeches he or she can observe in others: the parents, other relatives, but most importantly animals (Freud Reference Freud1908). In a section on the “sexual researches of childhood” which Freud added in 1915 to his Three Essays on Sexuality, he postulated an “instinct for knowledge or research” (Wiß- oder Forschertrieb) that is usually set in motion by the arrival of another child and the accompanying fear of losing the mother's attention and love (Freud Reference Freud1905, 194). The merciless battleground of the nuclear family provides the conditions for the infantile origins of scientific research: a work “always carried out in solitude” that would guide the child towards greater independence, but also to a “high degree of alienation . . . from the people in his environment who formerly enjoyed his complete confidence” (ibid., 197). Within this process, animals are of crucial importance to the young researcher: They provide observational facts about sexual activities that the parents try to deny or to obscure through their fairy-tale explanations of human sexuality. The fable that the stork brings the babies is powerfully contradicted by “the child's observation of animals, who hide so little of their sexual life and to whom he feels so closely akin” (Freud Reference Freud1908, 215).

On this level, the animal enters psychoanalysis as a subject of observation – less for the psychoanalyst than for the child who is cast in the role of the doubting researcher and theorist. Thus, if children seem at first close to animals in their “uninhibited expression of the instincts,” their first theoretical steps in understanding human sexuality introduce a “strange rift” in their “excellent relations” with animals and lead inevitably to an ambivalent relationship with them (Freud Reference Freud1913, 127). According to Freud, the most common neurotic expression of this ambivalence is the “clinical picture of an animal phobia . . ., a very common and perhaps the earliest form of psychoneurotic illness occurring in childhood. As a rule the phobia is attached to animals in which the child has hitherto shown a specially lively interest and it has nothing to do with any particular individual animal” (ibid.). For children living in towns, such frightful animals may be domestic — “horses, dogs, cats, less often birds,” but they may also be insects “such as beetles and butterflies” or even imaginary ones, appearing in “picture books or fairy tales” (ibid.).

From this heterogeneous list, it becomes clear that Freud's understanding of animals is capacious and deliberately unspecific from a zoological point of view; this lack of specificity is strategic, for it enables the theorist to draw a variety of cases – Ferenczi's case of little Árpád and its famous model, Freud's report about little Hans, and a few years later, the Wolfman – into the interpretive frame of the Oedipus complex. With regard to the first two cases, one may note that they do not conform at all to the so-called “classical model” of psychoanalytic practice. In the case of “Little Hans,” the verbal exchanges between the analyst and the boy in the doctor's office are very brief ones, while almost the entire material consists of observations reported by his father. The case of the little Rooster-Man is based on the account of a curious and disturbed neighbor who happened to be Ferenczi's patient and provided him with the notes of her extended studies of the boy's actions (Ferenczi [Reference Ferenczi, Ferenczi and Jones1913] Reference Ferenczi, Ferenczi and Jones1952; Freud and Ferenczi Reference Freud, Ferenczi, Brabant, Falzeder, Giampieri-Deutsch and Hoffer1992, 330). Whereas first-hand observation of the primal or the primitive is what is at stake here, most of what is reported seems to be of a highly mediated kind. In a 1909 discussion in the Vienna psychoanalytic society, Freud made some indications about the psychoanalytic observation of children that address this problem:

He also noted that the

The case of little Hans (who came later to be identified as Herbert Graf, the son of the musicologist Max Graf) clearly constitutes such a case of indirect observation (Freud Reference Freud1909). Freud did not conduct the analysis by himself, but rather acted as the director of the treatment at a distance. From the very beginning, the father adopted the role of the analyst, sending his notes to the “professor” on a weekly basis and receiving advice and instructions from him.Footnote ³

This situation led to the construction of a text in which several layers of observation are intertwined: on a first layer, there is Hans as the sexual researcher who is making observations about the genitals of human beings and animals at the zoo and in the street (primarily their “Wiwimacher,” rendered as “widdler” in Strachey's translation); on a second layer, there are his parents who, at Freud's request, carefully observe and report their son's behavior in written form (a quite common practice, we learn in the opening of the text, among the adherents of psychoanalysis) (ibid., 6); and on a third layer, there is Freud as the analyst of the material that is sent to him on a weekly basis by the father who conducts the analysis on his son – or rather draws Hans into an interrogation that is modeled on the techniques of psychoanalysis as they are known to him. The textual form is marked by this organization of the material: the animals observed by Hans are represented by drawings that were executed by him or with his father's help; the course of the analysis is rendered almost entirely in a dramatic form with Hans and his father as the major players, with footnotes and comments made then by Freud at his desk.

We do not intend to discuss the large literature on this case that has spurred some of the most acrimonious criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis.Footnote ⁴ Rather we want to problematize the role of the horse within the construction of the text which has largely the character of a protocol in which the events are reported in a more or less chronological order. First, Hans' period of sexual research is described, then the fear of horses occurs followed by the protocol of the treatment with his father and its positive resolution. One could certainly argue that the reported events were already highly preselected in view of the desired result, the confirmation of the existence of the Oedipus complex.Footnote ⁵ However, this seems to be a rather moot point if one keeps in mind that Hans' parents are from the very start presented as Freud's “closest adherents” (Freud Reference Freud1909, 6), who aspire to provide their son with a rational sex education in the spirit of psychoanalysis. The multilayered structure of the text and the fact that Max Graf actually acts as a representative for an actual psychoanalyst who has to perform multiple tasks (observing his son and the interaction between son and father, i.e. himself, while constantly transforming his observations into written notes), establishes an asymmetric distribution of knowledge in which Freud can always know more (and thus appear in a God-like role), simply because he is absent from the scene of treatment and in the position of the reader and interpreter of a text that he co-produces.Footnote ⁶

What then is the role of the horse and other animals in the case of little Hans? How does the horse turn from an object of infantile observation to an anxiety-laden animal? The major point that Freud seeks to prove is that the “horse complex” cannot have its source in one single traumatic event such as an accident with a falling horse that the boy has observed in the street: “He went for a walk with his mother, and saw a bus-horse fall down and kick about with its feet. This made a great impression on him. He was terrified, and thought the horse was dead; and from that time on he thought that all horses would fall down” (Freud Reference Freud1909, 125). According to Freud, the horse was only exalted into the object of his anxiety through a chain of associations tying together the warnings of adults (“the horse may bite”), the falling of another boy during the game of playing horse, and his own association of the father with the horse which was also established through earlier games between father and son (ibid., 137). In the process of psychoanalytic interpretation, then, the animal's role is gradually receding: it is shifted from being a threatening agent in the boy's fearful account to being a representation of the father. Behind the figure of the dreaded animal appears the structure of the Oedipal family that is now firmly placed at the root of infantile neurosis. In that sense, it doesn't come as a surprise that Freud notes at the very end of the text that he had “learnt nothing new from this analysis” and claimed “for this childhood neurosis the significance of being a type and a model” (ibid., 147).Footnote ⁷

A similar pattern can be observed in the other famous animal phobia that Freud discussed in the case of the “Wolf Man” (begun in 1914 and published in 1918), a text that builds in many ways on the report about “Little Hans,” although its structure is a very different one and more complex (Freud [Reference Freud1914] Reference Freud1918). Whereas both patients shared similar symptoms of an animal phobia, the wolf phobia of the Russian patient was an infantile neurosis lying in the past and thus had to be reconstructed during the analysis. Another major difference was that the anxiety-laden animal was “not the object easily accessible to observation (such as horse and dog), but was known to him only from stories and picture books” (ibid., 32). Therefore a large part of the analysis turns around the illustrated books of “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats” and the animals that the patient actually might have observed during his childhood. The white wolves of the wolf-dream, characterized by an intense reality effect, are treated by Freud as composite figures combining animals that the child encountered in real life before the age of four and with whom he kept imaginary relations.

These animals lead back to a scene that the patient had experienced as a boy without precisely knowing what he had seen – the “primal scene” (Urszene) depicted in a memory-picture as sexual intercourse between the parents. Only a later observation of the copulation of sheep-dogs provides an explanation of the behavior of his parents. Since the Wolf Man did not remember the copulating dogs – he remembers only sheep-dogs strolling around –, the act of observation as such is considered to be part of the repressed memory. Hence Freud has to introduce the sexual dog scene as a necessary assumption that accounts for the Wolf Man's marked preference for the “coitus a tergo.” Freud cannot dispense with the assumption that what the child “observed was not copulation between the parents but copulation between animals, which he then displaced on to his parents, as though he had inferred that his parents did things in the same way” (ibid., 57)

The wolf is, then, once again nothing more than a father substitute, a father who moreover had had a rather unhappy relation with his animals. At the time of the patient's dream “an epidemic broke out among sheep. His father sent for a follower of Pasteur's, who inoculated the animals, but after the inoculation even more of them died than before” (ibid., 30) As agents in the neurotic's account, the composite animal serves here not only as a substitute for a tragic father figure, the wolf-dogs are also shifted from being an object of observation to observers of the terrified dreamer: The wolves gaze from the tree at a child unable to move. This change from the infantile observer of the copulating dogs, who uses his impressions to develop attitudes towards the world, to a child observed by terrifying wolves accounts for the powerful emotional effect of the dream. The anxiety effect of the dream is presented as the result of an act of observation leading to the death threat of the subject under observation (ibid., 29).

Thus within Freud's theories, animals play a role insofar as they provide, albeit in an indirect manner, useful material for the formation of the Oedipus complex. They endow the doubting human subject with the real ingredients for his first theories about sexuality. Even if these theories form, together with fantasies, part of the infantile neurosis and have to be overcome at a later stage, the animal observation in childhood is granted the mark of reality. Thus the animal acquires a necessary role in the development of the infantile neurosis, a development that Freud declared to be universal with his bold thesis that the eating of the sacrificed animal during the totem feast has to be regarded as a distorted version of the killing of a primal father by the crowd of brothers at the dawn of human history (Freud Reference Freud1913, 141–43). With this naturalistic myth, the animal recedes even further, since psychoanalytic interpretation now tends to shift from the interaction between animal and patient in a concrete traumatic situation to the detection of father surrogates and Oedipal constellations in myth, folklore, literature, and art.

The “Primal Mother Situation”: Otto Rank and the “Trauma of Birth”

It is not without a certain irony that one of the major actors involved in this general move within the psychoanalytic movement to back up Freud's doctrine of the Oedipus complex would turn forcefully against it a decade later. In The Trauma of Birth, written in 1923 and published one year later, Freud's disciple and Ferenczi's friend Otto Rank challenged the interpretive model which tied animal phobias only to the role of the father within the Oedipal interpretation (Rank [Reference Rank1924] Reference Rank1988, Rank [Reference Rank1929] Reference Rank1994; see Lieberman Reference Lieberman1985). Rank developed his entire argument out of a single footnote from Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, added in 1909, where the latter had stated in passing that “the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and the prototype of the affect of anxiety” (Freud Reference Freud and Strachey1900, 400–401, n. 3, emphasis in the original). According to Rank's new theory, all further human psychical development consists of overcoming this initial birth trauma and has therefore to be referred to a “primal mother situation” (mütterliche Ursituation) (Rank [Reference Rank1924] Reference Rank1988, 28; Rank [Reference Rank1929] Reference Rank1994, 7). The infantile animal phobias, then, are to be interpreted as disguised wishes of the child to be eaten and thus to return into the “mother's animal womb” (Rank [Reference Rank1929] Reference Rank1994, 13).

In The Trauma of Birth, Rank's understanding of animals is as unspecific as Freud's, since his theorization applies to animals of all sizes and species: while big beasts of prey represent the mother's body in which the subject would like to return, insects and small creeping animals such as mice, snakes, or frogs create fear, because they “materialize one's own tendency . . . to go back into the mother, and one is afraid because they might creep into one's own body” (ibid., 14). In his book, Rank claimed that his new theory of infantile animal phobias was backed up by many dreams coming from his patients; but instead of publishing this material he inserted a single observation of “a little girl of three years” in a footnote, most likely his own daughter Helene born in 1919. He reported that this girl “feared small dogs just as much as, if not more than, large ones” and was “also afraid of insects,” because she believed they could swallow her. At the approach of small dogs, Rank noted, “she makes the same characteristic movements of defence that a grown-up person makes with a mouse; she bends her knees so low, at the same time pressing her legs close together, that her little dress touches the ground, and she can cover herself as if she wanted to prevent them from ‘creeping in’” (ibid., 14, n. 1). We don't know how closely Rank observed his own daughter.Footnote ⁸ But since he preferred to quote the girl's mother, this is yet another instance of indirect observation. Very much in the style of his first contributions to Freud's dream theory, Rank linked this single observation with symbolic interpretations derived from mythology and anthropology (ibid., 15–17).Footnote ⁹

With this new interpretive model, Rank claimed to complement, not to revise Freud's interpretation of animals as a totemic father substitute, by grounding it in a new and deeper biological framework:

As this passage reveals, the form in which Rank made place for Freud's Oedipal model was quite ambiguous: it put the father at the center of the triad as the inhibiting figure, but within an account that replaced the castration anxiety by the deeper rooted birth trauma as represented by the mother's genitals. Fear of castration, then, appeared only as a derivative of the “primal castration at birth, that is, . . . the separation of the child from the mother” (Rank [Reference Rank1929] Reference Rank1994, 20). Moreover, with this daring move, Rank shifted the major dynamics of the infantile sexual development to a pre-Oedipal stage in which the animal appears first as a representative of a pleasure-laden and then as an anxiety-laden mother symbol. Only with the later onset of the phobia, was the animal supposed to become the Oedipal “inhibiting father substitute,” to be superseded by further infantile “observation of the sexuality of animals and of small animals, which symbolize the foetus as well as the penis” leading once again to an investment with “maternal libido” (ibid., 15).

At the same time, Rank came in conjunction with Ferenczi to a reconceptualization of the psychoanalytic technique as Freud had tried to formulate it in his technical papers (Ferenczi and Rank [Reference Ferenczi and Rank1924] Reference Ferenczi and Rank1925). Their plea for “active therapy” propagated to a certain extent a return to hypnosis, since it put emphasis on the replacement of intellectual processes by moments of affective experience. While Ferenczi had argued that hypnosis derived its powerful effects from the child's attachment to both parents (Ferenczi [Reference Ferenczi, Ferenczi and Jones1909] Reference Ferenczi, Ferenczi and Jones1952), within Freud's anthropological amplification of the Oedipus complex the submission to the hypnotist was to be explained as a revival of an “archaic heritage” of the individual members of the “primal horde to the primal father” (Freud Reference Freud1921, 127). In The Trauma of Birth, Rank now went in the opposite direction declaring that the “essence of hypnosis itself” had its source in the “primal relation of child to the mother” (Rank [Reference Rank1929] Reference Rank1994, 7). The analytic situation with the patient lying in a “restful position in a half-darkened room,” the “dreamy state of phantasy,” and the “presence and at the same time the uncertainty of the libido object” (the analyst in his chair behind the patient's head), all these features seemed to be perfectly designed in a way to enable the patient to slip into the “primal mother situation.” Psychoanalysis as such, then, “turns out to be a belated accomplishment of the incompleted mastery of the birth trauma” (ibid., 5; emphasis in the original). This framework for theorizing the “analytical situation,” Rank emphasized, was grounded in “biological facts,” the “real transference-libido” being considered to be “the mother-libido, as it existed in the pre-natal physiological connection between mother and child” (ibid., 6).

While Freud was first willing to accept Rank's ideas as an hypothesis, it seemed obviously difficult for him to approve of an account in which his own consulting room appeared ultimately as modeled on the mother's “animal body,” with references to techniques and physiological theorizations of hypnosis that he himself had come to abandon in the gradual emergence of the psychoanalytic setting.Footnote ¹⁰ In Rank's analogy between the analytic situation and the primal mother situation, the setting clearly resembled the one adopted by most of the advocates of hypnosis since the 1890s, a setting in which all elements had to be adapted to the patient's comfort, the voice of the hypnotist playing a crucial role in the management of the treatment (Mayer Reference Mayer2006 and Reference Mayer2013). Rank's defection from the psychoanalytic movement, then, was not merely a matter of theoretical divergences over the Oedipus complex and the notion of anxiety, a matter that Freud would try to settle in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (Freud Reference Freud1926), but also of an alteration of his technique which aimed to conform neatly to the physiological and psychological aspects of the supposed birth trauma. Whereas this new technique appeared to many members of the psychoanalytic movement as a form of historical “regression” (see Lieberman and Kramer Reference Lieberman and Kramer2012), Rank claimed to have found a firm “biological basis” for the “almost incredible findings of the technique of ‘free associations’” (Rank [Reference Rank1929] Reference Rank1994, 8). In order to make plausible that his framework was truly grounded in biology and not in metaphors or “rebirth fantasies,” Rank referred to zoological observations about maternal “mouthbrooding,” the care given by African and South American cichlids to their offspring by holding them in the mouth for extended periods of nesting (ibid., 27). He claimed that the animal instinct “contains in its essence the adjustment of the pre-natal libido to the outer world, and also the tendency to make this outer world resemble as faithfully as possibly the previously experienced primal state; whilst man, because of his long period of pregnancy and with the help of later-developed and higher capacities of thought, attempts, in every conceivable way, to re-establish, as it were, creatively the real primal condition” (ibid., 28). In humans, this pleasurable re-establishment of the primal situation would either succeed in the “socially adjusted phantasy products of art, religion, mythology” or fail and lead to neurosis. The radical consequence of this biological analogy which put the psychoanalyst in the position of the mother was to resolve the difficult question of the typical length of psychoanalytic treatment by referring to the usual length of a pregnancy (seven to ten months) as terminus ad quem.

“Archaic Models” for the Oedipus Complex: Imre Hermann's Theory of the “Clinging Instinct”

As we have seen, when it comes to animals, a style of indirect observation and a tendency to resort to myth, literature, and folklore marked Freud and other members of the first generations of the psychoanalytic movement, even in their moves towards a more biologically grounded conception of analytic practice, as in the case of Ferenczi and Rank. As a number of critics of Freud's work have noted, the various interactions between the child and animals became inevitably irrelevant or a mere “residue” of a theoretical explanation. However, we are not concerned here with a criticism of Freud's “zoological vision” (cf. Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987; Genosko Reference Genosko1993) or the decontextualization of the observed animals (aptly noted by Ginzburg Reference Ginzburg and Tedeschi1989), but rather with the status of animals as receding objects of observation within psychoanalysis.Footnote ¹¹

In the following, we will discuss the role of animal observation for the further development of the psychoanalytic theory of instincts. After Rank's attempts to emphasize the importance of the pre-Oedipal stage, another contribution that proved to be influential, especially for object relation theories and later attachment-theorists such as René Spitz or John Bowlby, was the work of the neurologist and psychoanalyst Imre Hermann (1889-1984), albeit in a less visible manner.Footnote ¹² In the 1920s, Hermann became a member of the so-called Budapest school which included István Hollós, and Alice and Michael Balint. He was trained in Budapest by Ferenczi and Elisabeth Révész-Radó, but had first worked as an assistant in Géza Révész's laboratory of experimental psychology. Among his first studies in this field, one may note a study on the importance of the hand for selective actions (Wahlhandlungen). This paper, cowritten with his wife (Hermann and Hermann-Cziner Reference Hermann and Hermann-Cziner1923), already went beyond a mere experimental investigation by arguing that primitive man and infants make choices according to an immediate disposition (unmittelbare Reizeinstellung) which is accompanied by a motoric reflex of the right or the left hand. This primitive motility is superseded in the process of evolution in favor of higher, more complex forms of choosing where both hands come into play. At the same time, Hermann made observations on infants in Berlin clinics where he noticed that the sucking of thumbs was often accompanied by a strong clinging reflex (cf. Geröly Reference Geröly1963, 11; Hermann Reference Hermann1943).

Hermann's first contributions to psychoanalytic journals developed these first works gradually into a theme that would lead him to a complete reformulation of Freud's theory of instincts: the clinging of little apes to their mother's body was interpreted as an archaic model of the Oedipus- and castration complex in humans. Hermann's work deserves interest in a discussion about the role of animals in psychoanalytic theory, since he seems to be the first psychoanalyst who engaged more systematically with the work of contemporary primatology and animal psychology.Footnote ¹³ His attempt to ground the theory of instincts in a comparative study of human and animal behavior marked a difference with the earlier attempts by Freud, Ferenczi, and Rank, although their studies remained important reference points.

Within Hermann's method of comparative observation, however, one must note an asymmetry: whereas the remarks about patients and babies were mostly derived from his own observations, the material about animals was again taken from texts. To a large extent, Hermann resorted to indirect observation, being an avid reader and reviewer of some of the most discussed studies within the buzzing field of primatology: Wolfgang Köhler's investigations on the intelligence in apes in Teneriffa that were conducted during the First World War and published shortly after (Köhler Reference Köhler1921); Yerkes' study of the gorilla Congo (Yerkes Reference Yerkes1927); the Kelloggs’ book on their educational experiments with the little chimpanzee Gua (Kellogg and Kellogg Reference Kellogg and Kellogg1933); and Solly Zuckerman's work on the sociology of monkeys at the London Zoo (Zuckerman Reference Zuckerman1932 and Reference Zuckerman1933).

Hermann's interest in these studies may have started already when he worked with Geza Révész who is today well known for his work on the psychology of music and artistic talent, but who also conducted together with David Katz important studies on the social psychology of animals and especially on the function of the human and the animal hand (Katz and Révész Reference Katz and Révész1907; Révész [Reference Révész1944] Reference Révész1958). Although the epistemic cultures of experimental psychology and psychoanalysis had institutionally drifted apart after 1914, Hermann can be counted among those rare figures who, at least for a while, belonged to both.Footnote ¹⁴ But while his initial training as an experimental psychologist led him to favor observable phenomena over speculative constructions, his entrance into training analysis clearly transformed his stance towards the psychological literature and the ways such observations had to be assessed. Already in his first article on the psychology of chimpanzees (Hermann Reference Hermann1923), he posited himself as a kind of meta-observer who draws theoretical conclusions from an analysis of the experimental set-up and the interactions between the psychologist and the animal. In the case of Köhler's observations of monkeys in Teneriffa, he argued for a complete reversal of perspective: instead of placing the emphasis on the intellectual performances that are the subject of the psychological experiments, Hermann brings the animal's affectivity and sexuality to the fore, features that are only mentioned at the margins of the psychologist's account in the form of painful and disturbing incidents. Whereas Köhler made an effort to desexualize his animal subjects by describing them as “sexually clean” in spite of their fondness for “dirty habits” (Köhler Reference Köhler1921, 69–70),Footnote ¹⁵ Hermann finds room for all these practices in the organization of “polymorphously perverse” sexuality. The sucking and licking of thumbs or fingers and the frequency of eating feces are all reinterpreted in the light of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality as pleasurable autoerotic activities.

Hermann goes one step further when he not only notes the psychologist's blindness for the various manifestations of primate sexuality, but also critically comments upon the drastic methods of punishment that were used to fight the animal's “bad habits.” The animal psychologist is portrayed here as a kind of “primal father” of the crowd of monkeys forbidding them sexual intercourse and the “disgusting habits” of extra-genital acts of sexuality (Hermann Reference Hermann1923, 81). Hermann comes to the conclusion that Köhler's “Umwegversuche” in which his animal subjects have to make use of roundabout routes for circumventing obstacles that separate them from their “object of desire” (usually a banana) introduces the “reality principle” into the animal world where the “primary processes” still reign. The animal psychologist's account in which he presents himself as a detached observer of the intelligent performances of his subjects, then, is rewritten in a way that posits affectivity as an essential component of these performances and that stresses the inhibiting character of the experimental design.

In his reading of Yerkes' study The Mind of a Gorilla (1927), Hermann adopts a similar strategy when he remarks on the question of how the psychologist “was able to experiment at all with this poor, abandoned animal-child that was used to its family life” (Hermann Reference Hermann1931, 38). According to the psychoanalyst, it is the affective transference relationship that was made possible when the experimenter removed Congo completely from his caretakers and started to use electrical stimuli as a punishment for incorrect choices in a multiple-choice test. Hermann used the notion of “transference” here in a very large sense as a form of affective rapport between the experimenter and his animal subject. In his report, Yerkes devoted several pages to the phenomenon of “warming up or awakening” under which he understood “a sudden radical change in the animal's attitude toward its task and markedly increased effort and success” (Yerkes Reference Yerkes1927, 162). This expression clearly refers to the frequent failures in the performances that were elicited from Congo and her usually rather “negativistic” attitude towards the experimenter (ibid, 185). Although within Yerkes behaviorist experimental situation, there was a certain room for surprise,Footnote ¹⁶ the affective bond between him and the female gorilla child could not be addressed: Hermann's reinterpretation of his set-up shows an empathy with the animal subject that is a recurrent feature in his writings.Footnote ¹⁷

When Hermann published his first papers, “psychoanalytical animal psychology” was a quasi non-existent field. Adolf Storfer, the director of the psychoanalytic publishing house, noted in a review of Hermann's work in 1931 that a psychoanalytically informed study of the animal soul was only in its infancy and consituted a “difficult and complicated task” (Storfer Reference Storfer1931, 49). In his work from the 1930s that ran parallel with Melanie Klein's observations on children in a modified psychoanalytic setting (Klein Reference Klein1928), Hermann made a case for the superiority of animal psychology to control the findings of psychoanalysis. The primatological literature held a privileged position, because, in contrast to children, animals could not be influenced by an environment that, according to Hermann, seemed permeated by psychoanalysis (Hermann Reference Hermann1934, 105). However, this argument against Klein's observation of children may seem less plausible if one keeps in mind that by the early 1930s (at the latest), Freud's theories had already been taken up by a number of researchers who studied the psychology of animals (such as Buytendijk Reference Buytendijk1933 or Zuckerman Reference Zuckerman1933). This problem of the theory-ladenness of animal observation was never explicitly addressed by Hermann, but somewhat circumvented by his strategy to combine data from a great variety of sources (including prehistorical and anthropological studies).

The claim to superiority of the material from animal observation over psychoanalytically informed studies on children indicates that Hermann's project of a comparative investigation of human and animal psychology had turned into a quite ambitious project. Although he started almost every article with the methodological disclaimer that psychoanalytic theories and techniques only apply to humans, his further work aimed to recast the Oedipus complex and the traumatic experiences in childhood through a reconstruction of archaic “models” whose primary expression were to be found in the relationships between the male and female members of simian groups.Footnote ¹⁸ Such models are made up by various “scenes,” “situations,” or “modes of behavior” that Hermann extracted from the primatological literature.

In a 1935 contribution to a symposium held in Vienna on “The death instinct and masochism,” Hermann made a further step by introducing a new formulation of the psychoanalytic theory of instincts (Hermann [Reference Hermann, Nunberg and Hartman1936] Reference Hermann, Nunberg and Hartman1976). Freud's substantial revision of his own theory of instincts, with the introduction of a new dualism between the “death instincts” (Todestriebe) and the “life instincts” (Lebenstriebe) or “Eros” (Freud Reference Freud1920), had by that time led to a new division among psychoanalysts. In contrast to those who rejected the concept of the death instinct (such as Wilhelm Reich or Otto Fenichel [Reference Fenichel, Fenichel and Rapaport1935] Reference Fenichel, Fenichel and Rapaport1953) or fully adopted it (such as Melanie Klein [Reference Klein1928]), Hermann's position was a more nuanced one. Very much in the spirit of Freud's first theory of the instincts, he introduced two new “component instincts of the libido,” “clinging,” and “going on search,” in order to account for clinical manifestations of sadism and masochism. He was drawing on an interpretation of Freud's dualism of life and death instincts that had been formulated by the Dutch physiologist and psychologist Frederik Buytendijk in his work on the play of humans and animals (Buytendiik Reference Buytendijk1933, 80–113; Hermann [Reference Hermann, Nunberg and Hartman1936] Reference Hermann, Nunberg and Hartman1976, 26). According to this reformulation, the opposition between life and death should be translated into one between two basic instincts (Urtriebe) by which the animal or child either strives to liberate himself by pushing the other away and become independent (Befreiungstrieb), or searches for a fusion with the other in the desire to return to the mother (Vereinigungstrieb) (Buytendiik Reference Buytendijk1933, 101–104).

Within this framework, Hermann understood the urge to cling to the mother's body not primarily as a physiological need (the search for food), but as an attempt to restore the broken unit of mother and child: “In the organism as a whole . . ., there does not exist either a grasping reflex or some undefined grasping instinct; what does exist is the clinging instinct which drives the organism toward an even more complete entity (the mother-child unit)” (Hermann [Reference Hermann, Nunberg and Hartman1936] Reference Hermann, Nunberg and Hartman1976, 11). Not unlike Rank's theory of the birth trauma, then, Hermann reformulated the Freudian castration complex with regard to a deeper infantile anxiety experienced in the premature separation from the mother's body. The fear to lose one's genitals is considered to be a secondary effect, as is the aggressivity directed at others. In order to cope with the original trauma, the human subject then can only repeat it with his own hands – either in play where the detachment is enacted with objects (such as in the Fort-Da game of Freud's grand-son where the child throws a bobbin away in order to deal with the mother's absence [Freud Reference Freud1920]) or on his own body in compulsive acts of self-destruction (such as tearing out hair, forms of automutilation) or suicide. For the latter, Hermann found evidence both in the anthropological studies on rituals involving hair and nails (Roheim and Stoll Reference Roheim and Stoll1908; Roheim Reference Roheim1921) and in the phenomenon of delousing among primates. The separation from the mother as the object of clinging, then, is representated by the first cutting of hair.

Hermann completed his reformulation of the theory of instincts by positing an antagonistic “searching” or “migratory instinct” (Auf-Suche-Gehen or Suchtrieb) that has its origins not in the hand, but in the mouth and the sucking reflex in lower animals (Hermann [Reference Hermann, Nunberg and Hartman1936] Reference Hermann, Nunberg and Hartman1976; idem 1941, 257–258). The reactive or defensive repetitions of this instinct would occur in children's hide-and-seek games, whereas the phenomena of restlessness and the “roaming instinct” (Wandertrieb), as described in the German and French psychiatric literature since the late nineteenth century, counted as its compulsive manifestations.Footnote ¹⁹

On a theoretical level, Hermann considered Freud's opposition of “death instincts” and “life instincts” as an abstraction and not an “autonomous reality” (Hermann Reference Hermann1935, 426); he therefore proposed to integrate them into his “vortex theory of instincts,” first formulated in 1933, by understanding them in a purely formal sense of an instinctual trajectory, but devoid of historical or empirical content (Hermann Reference Hermann1972, 272–278). The suggestive model of the vortex is derived from the idea that all manifestations of the unconscious follow long and unforseen detours, both inside and outside the analyst's office, and find an analogy in the idea of circular movement as the most primitive form of motility (Hermann Reference Hermann1935, 419). Hermann conceived of the patients' actions as a set of embodied movements: not only did he discuss the long and crooked paths of free association, but also the bodily detours that patients would make to lie down on the couch or to shake the analyst's hand at the beginning or at the end of a session (ibid., 414). Hermann's reformulation of the Freudian theory of instincts, then, sought to dovetail very closely with the patients' behavior during the sessions.Footnote ²⁰ During sessions, Hermann would devote all his attention to the various body positions and gestures that they adopted when lying down on the couch or refusing to do so. Some patients desired to take the analyst's hand or adopt a position on the couch that suggests an infantile sleeping position in which they look for something or somebody to cling to. A female patient's dreams had as sole remembered content the phrase:

Another patient's compulsive roaming often ended with a visit to a prostitute whom he sometimes simply paid without having engaged in any sexual activity. According to Hermann, this led back to a childhood scene where the boy had been shaken off from the mother's body by the father and that “in his ‘roaming’ he was in the final analysis searching for the mother” (ibid., 19).

Another set of observations concerned pulling out hair and fantasies centering on hair in general which are related to the “grooming” or “delousing” among apes, phenomena frequently described in the ethological literature. The pain that the human subject may inflict upon himself through such acts that can also involve tugging on one's nails, biting one's fingers or pulling on cuticles would then refer back to the original trauma that is now eroticized in a masochistic way, but also made manageable in a form of detachment as a “self-intended, self-apportioned action by a free ‘adult’” (ibid., 32). In that sense, the masochistic and sadistic impulses that for Freud (Reference Freud1920) constituted clinical points of departure for the assumption of a death instinct were here perceived not only as concrete regressive acts of the separation conflict, but also as acts that already contain a “healing tendency.”

Domestic animals also appear quite often as friendly or fearful agents in patients’ accounts but also within Hermann's own practice.Footnote ²¹ A female patient “remembers having sat on a staircase as a very small girl with her arms about the neck of a large dog, which was her friend. As an adult, she would do the same thing, whenever she nestled affectionately against a man. She kept her son ‘tied to’ herself, cleaning him with her own hands, even in his sixth year, after he had relieved himself” (Hermann [Reference Hermann, Nunberg and Hartman1936] Reference Hermann, Nunberg and Hartman1976, 14). Another analysand of Hermann's had his right hand at his neck and the left hand on the couch, a position he also adopted at night in bed. “The explanation for this position is that he is afraid that a cat might jump on the couch, put his tail into his mouth and suffocate him in this way. A woman of his acquaintance had actually been asphyxiated by a cat. But a posture that he adopted during his childhood is quite similar: at this time, he feared that his father would have sex with his sister and lay in wait in such a body position” (Hermann Reference Hermann1972, 398).

To be sure, Hermann's patient observations are not worked out in the elaborate fashion of the case history, but rather constitute “vignettes,” often only flashes from the clinical practice that were then inserted in a larger collection of materials to corroborate his theory of instincts. The use of such a condensed format made it easier to link them to the “model situations” derived from the primatological literature. In the light of contemporary ethology that has rejected many of the studies to which Hermann referred and the later attachment theorists who have insisted on the priority of direct infant observation,Footnote ²² the systematic use of such indirect observations may appear today as a major weakness of his theoretical constructions. However, the absence of direct animal observation appears to be quite consistent with this approach if one bears in mind that the primates furnish the “archaic model” of the undivided unity towards which the human subject wishes to return.